


And Back (The Road to Hell)

by ophan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angelic Trueforms, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt Michael, Hurt/Comfort, Life after the Apocalype, M/M, Other, Post-Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Redemption, Road Trips, grief and recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-28 21:29:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8463583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophan/pseuds/ophan
Summary: When Sam sacrificed himself at Stull to save the world, it still ended for his brother. Two months later, when Dean has turned to drink and the road for comfort, the archangel Michael turns up to make him an offer he thinks the ex-hunter will not be able to refuse. Or,The road to hell is paved with good intentions.





	1. I.

**I.**

 

There is no storm to herald the coming of this archangel.

The heavens do not open, lightning does not shatter the sky, and no calamitous roar of angelic fury blows in the windowpanes of the shabby motel, or cracks every glass surface in the place. There’s no song of heaven, no clarion call, no blaring angelic trumpet.

There’s nothing but the muted yet persistent knocking, some time close to midnight, and that’s why Dean Winchester opens the door.

It’s because he doesn’t recognise the dark-haired man standing on his doorstep, that Dean doesn’t immediately reach for his gun. His brain is still slow with drink, his temper foul from the constant hangover. He looks up, just slightly, and into the electric blue eyes of the stranger, and then, and only then, does he know.

“Hello, Dean,” the archangel Michael says.

It’s as though the haze of grief-fuelled drinking finally lifts, nearly two months after the causal event, and cold, hard clarity comes down like a hammer blow in its place. Dean blinks, stares, and takes one step back.

In hindsight, it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to refer to what happened in Stull as the death of his brother, but Dean Winchester cannot bring himself to think of it as such. To believe that Sam is dead - to accept that - is not possible. Sam is not dead, Sam - his Sammy, his baby brother - is in hell. Sam is therefore most definitely _not_ dead, and that is by far the greater part of the overwhelming mess of grief and guilt that has become Dean’s life. The crux of the matter. The heart of the issue. Sam Winchester is in hell, and Dean failed to save him. Sammy is in hell, and this bastard, standing in his doorway, looking at him with dipped chin and wary discomfort, this feathered freak of Creation, helped put him there.

The clock on the wall continues to tock softly to itself, the comedy bird head of its pendulum keeping time with the hammering of Dean’s heart. He lunges forward. Some time during the scuffle, the door swings slowly closed behind the archangel, as Dean drags him inside, swings him round and puts him down on the floor with one blow. The mindless, plastic cuckoo-eyes watch as he straddles the visitor’s chest and lands punch after punch to the angel’s face and head, his chest heaving with each strike, his teeth clenched in fury. There is sweat on his brow and blood on his knuckles, and eventually down his t-shirt, where it joins the forgotten droplets of beer in a bright crimson flare.

The clock has long since trilled midnight when Dean leans back, still astride the motionless form beneath him. His harsh breathing drowns out the ticking, covering up the distant hiss of traffic passing by on the highway at the far end of the parking lot.

The archangel between his knees doesn’t move, has not raised a hand to protect himself once since he spoke those two words of greeting. He lies still beneath the panting weight of his true vessel, and his bright blue eyes stare up at the dirty ceiling as though he looks heavenwards in supplication.

 

\--

 

Dean washes his knuckles in the bathroom sink, the blood stark and ugly against the clean white porcelain. His hands are throbbing, and the skin across the ridges of them both is split. In the mirror his reflection still wears a grimace of fury, and even now he can feel it twisting in his chest. His shoulders are tight with tension, and his movements are quick and rough, his attention half on his wounds but mostly on watching the door.

When he’s done he pulls a roll of bandages from the bag by the sink, medical supplies dumped in their customary position through long years of habit. Old customs, even though he shouldn’t need them any more. He binds his hands with practiced ease, and moves back to stand in the doorway, giving himself line of sight into the main room.

The archangel sits at the small table pushed up beneath the window, carefully dabbing at the corner of his mouth. He lowers his fingers and looks down at the blood as though this is the first time he has ever seen it. Perhaps that really is the truth.

Dean can see that his pale skin isn’t even bruised, despite the punishment he has taken. Save for that small trickle of blood at the very corner of the angel’s mouth, all the blood on his face is from Dean’s knuckles. As entirely predictable as this is, still it does nothing for Dean’s mood.

“Get out.”

Michael looks up at him, and even from across the room Dean sees a soft sigh lift the angel’s shoulders. The man that the angel is wearing is not Adam. This vessel is broader in the shoulder, squarer of jaw, and his hair is thick and black. Older too, somewhere in his early thirties, Dean thinks. His eyes though, the striking blue of them, are all Michael.

“Will you not even listen to why I am here?”

“I don’t care why you’re here,” Dean replies flatly. “Get out.”

Michael blinks slowly, and then his gaze drifts away, across the room, moving over the cheap furniture and tacky decor. The man he’s wearing is beautiful, like one of those brooding Adonises found in the black and white photoshoots of fashion mags. It makes Dean uncomfortable, knowing that somehow, somewhere, no matter how tenuously, this guy is probably related to him.

“I said-”

“I heard you the first time, Dean Winchester.”

Dean falls silent, cut short by the tone of command in the angel’s voice. It’s every bit the distinctive archangelic arrogance he remembers, that easy confidence underpinned by such effortless, offhand threat. But there’s something else there too. It’s a weary edge that he’s never heard from Michael, frustration and just the slightest edge of agitation underscoring his tone. Whatever it is, Dean knows from long experience that should Michael truly wish it, there is no harm he can choose to inflict that Dean would be able to prevent.

It’s been two months since Stull, and Dean can still feel the grief of it tying up his body. It’s a strange thing, a state of being that he at once recognises and fears for its unpredictability. He can go a day, two days, three, with the world passing quiet around him, and then the memory of it returns to him. The world has not ended, and my brother is in hell.

Alcohol, as it has been so many times down the years, is his refuge. It numbs, as it promises, fending off trouble to be dealt with another time. Dean has long known that he cannot do as Sam does. He can’t feed off that steely cold anger, that insanity of purpose and obsession his brother is so good at. He tries, because weakness is unacceptable, but where cold fury drives Sam onwards, guilt will always drag Dean down. He’s simply gotten good at covering it over the years.

The archangel turns his bright eyes upon him, and says, “I have returned to serve penance at your hands. I will accept whatever judgement you lay down upon me.”

Dean doesn’t hear the words, not really. His brain has finally caught up with his emotions, breaking through the haze of grief and fury with a single, persistent train of thought. “Is he out too?”

Michael knows without him having to say it, to what Dean is referring. He pauses, clearly having expected a different response. “No. Lucifer remains in his Cage.”

“My brother-”

“Is with him.”

It’s the simplicity of the statement that gets to Dean. The callousness of it. The same old fury twists in his chest, curling his lip up, and he pushes himself forward. He’s two paces away from the archangel when he draws up short, his muscles taut with the need to put his fist through this smug bastard’s face. The rage in him is old, and tired, and just as desperately futile as it has always been. So they saved the world. So Sammy is still in hell.

“Bring my brother back.”

“I cannot.” 

“Then get the hell out!” Dean’s shout echoes off the walls. Michael doesn’t flinch, but his eyes narrow, and he draws in on himself slightly. Dean sees it and doesn’t understand the movement, doesn’t understand why the angel is not fighting back, why he hasn’t fought back since the moment Dean threw the first punch.

“Dean-”

“How are you out, and they’re not?” Dean leans down, putting his face close to the angel’s. It’s suicide to threaten an archangel, but he’s already punched this one to the floor, and there’s no longer anything left to lose.

For the first time, Michael hesitates. For all that he is capable of, lying is clearly not something that comes easily to him. Dean can read the idea of deception on his face without even trying. He sees it too when the archangel clearly discards the idea.

“My Father,” the angel begins. Dean feels himself go cold, the blood draining from his face. He sways, and has to step away, setting his feet more firmly. God. The Almighty. If He is involved then there is nothing, _nothing_ that can be done. If God has chosen this then who is anyone to say otherwise? His throat is tight, his vision has begun to blur. Michael looks up at him and says, “The Cage was never intended for me. He brought me back to pay penance for my failures. He brought me back that you might have your vengeance.”

Dean doesn’t hear him. He turns awkwardly, and when he sways the angel reaches out for him. But Dean doesn’t see the movement, he is already walking away. His hand finds the bottle of Jack on the side cabinet and takes hold of the neck. It’s almost empty.

“Dean,” the archangel says. And then again, more insistently. “Dean, wait. You must wait. This is your duty. God has decreed, this is your duty.”

Dean does turn back to look at him then, taking in the tall, beautiful form that the archangel is using. His vessel is wearing a shirt, white and open at the collar. A dark suit completes the outfit, like something a powerful man might wear to a business meeting. He looks every inch the archangel in modern human form.

Not even the humility to look slightly unkempt by all that’s befallen them both.

“Punish you?” Dean asks. There’s disbelief in his voice, and a dark, bitter curl of laughter.

Michael rises to his feet, and nods once, gravely. “I will accept whatever punishment you deem fit.”

Dean looks at him, at the relief that lights the angel’s eyes at his comprehension, at the archangel, back from hell, back from the dead, standing in his shitty motel room, and wonders how it came to this.

 

\--

 

Dean, naturally, ditches Michael at the first opportunity and takes to the road.

“Wait here,” he tells the archangel. Then he packs his bags and heads out into the night, leaving the archangel as far behind him as the highway will allow. Angels are good at obeying orders, he figures, at least when they think there’s something in it for them.

As he cruises through downtown, keeping to the speed limit so as not to draw the attention of a bored traffic cop, it finally occurs to him to wonder how the archangel found him. Even now he should be hidden from the sight of heaven and its minions. There’s no spell Dean knows of that can overcome the marking Castiel placed upon him - if there had been the feathered bastards would have used it long ago. He frowns into the glare of the streetlamps and hurries for the open road.

 

\--

 

Michael catches up with him at a diner.

It’s eleven thirty-two in the morning and this is the third one Dean has passed. He’d driven through the night on adrenaline and long practice, passing up likely stopping points in favour of pushing on just that little bit further. Finally though, hunger and fatigue had overcome him and he’d pulled in at this dusty old place, with its cheap and cheerful facade. The sign outside had said breakfast served until eleven am. Dean’s charm had gotten him served regardless. Even now he’s still capable of working someone round to his way of thinking.

He’s halfway through a plate of eggs when the archangel slides into the seat across from him and folds his arms along the edge of the table. Dean looks up into his very blue eyes, still chewing, albeit more slowly now, and stares an unfriendly acknowledgement. Michael nods gravely to him, and for the barest, most disagreeable of moments, the expression reminds Dean of Castiel.

As he wordlessly finishes up his eggs and his extra strong coffee, he wonders again how the archangel managed to follow him. Of course, once something as viciously powerful as an archangel has your trail, there’s very little you can do to throw them off. That’s the whole point of not being caught by them in the first place. Fortunately, Dean is aware of this. He reaches below the table, slips on one of the trinkets he’d had made a few months back with precisely this type of situation in mind, and rises to his feet.

For whatever his reasons, Michael does not block the incoming blow. The silver knuckle-dusters are made from angelic steel, or whatever metal it is that angels use in their blades. Whatever it is, it melts down well enough and can be fashioned into appropriately shaped weaponry, later to be inscribed with as many unfriendly Enochian symbols as its creator has knowledge of.

He’s sure he sees Michael’s eyes widen fractionally as he registers the incoming armoured blow, but then Dean’s fist, reinforced by angelic steel, meets the perfectly sculpted corner of his cheekbone in a flash of light and the archangel goes down. Dean’s actually a little bit impressed.

With a flick of his wrist he tosses money down onto the table, and then leaves the place behind, using the gathering crowd to cover his exit.

 

\--

 

As it has for almost his entire life, the road stretches open and empty before him. Dean relaxes back in the driver’s seat and watches the forest pass by on either side. The road climbs its wending way slowly higher, and he follows the curve and coil of it up towards the tiny town above. He intends to overnight here and then make his way down the other side and onto the plains, and from there-, he’ll decide where next is once he hits the city.

Dean hasn’t been to the city in a while. Not really. Not on his own, without his brother.

He thinks of Sam, of how his brother’s eyes were always drawn to libraries and old buildings, shopping centres and, god forbid, bookshops. Sam liked little cafes with hipster coffee, and those weird health food stores full of pills and dried fruit. Going to the city with Sam had been an exercise in boredom during the day. Mostly they’d split up and Sam would go his way, and Dean would go the opposite. When they met in the night they’d shoot pool, trawl for chicks, do the things they could both agree on.  

He tells himself that he needs to get a grip before he gets maudlin. He directs his breathing to loosen and the desperate energy in his arms that wants to wrench the steering wheel to the side and take them off the road, that wants to slam his foot against the pedal and scream them up this winding road like a bat out of hell, he tells that urge to still, because he knows where that song ends.

This motel hides itself beneath the trees, and has walls of timber and black iron. It’s picturesque he supposes. Pricey too, for what he wants, but money doesn’t matter. He can always get more money from somewhere. He unpacks his bag from the Impala in the dark, leaving most of his stuff in the trunk. He’ll only be here the one night.

Once inside he spends a long minute just standing in the middle of a room that’s too much just for him, wondering if he should ward the place up. He should, of course. A good hunter doesn’t leave any angle open to attack, and if he’s nothing else then Dean Winchester is a good hunter. He uses chalk where he can, drawing symbols behind pictures and under rugs, trying not to wreck the venue for any hunter that might one day follow on behind. Old habits die hard.

Afterwards he sits on the too-large bed and stares around himself. Nice place. It smells of pine and the underlying fruit scent of cleaning chemicals. He’d bring a family here to visit, if he had one.

Who can he call now? Bobby? Cas? No to either of them. No, not yet. Not ever maybe. What would he even say? There’s an archangel on my tail again and I don’t care anymore what he wants.

He lies back on the firm, tidy bed, and eventually he sleeps.

 

\--

 

The knocking comes at two am. Dean opens his eyes to the sighing of the forest outside and knows who it has to be. Not even twenty-four hours. Silently he pushes himself to his feet and reaches blindly for his shoes. He never undressed himself before sleeping, a bad habit to get into, but one that will serve him well tonight.

The quiet knocking, in that soft, persistent rhythm, still comes from the front door. Dean glances sideways, picks up his unpacked bag and makes for the window at the back of the room. A cursory glance earlier on in the evening had told him that it opened out onto the rear parking lot, and due to the time of year, there had been sufficient room for him to draw up the Impala just beneath the room’s window. He’d already unscrewed the safety catches along the frame while warding the place up earlier.

Moving carefully and with utmost care, he unlatches the window and forces it upwards, before swinging himself out over the window ledge. He lands in the soft earth below, and pushes past a scraggly bush that grips at his trousers with sharp twigs. Quietly he unlocks the car and gets inside, and then, with his bag slung across onto the passenger side, he starts up the engine and reverses himself out.

He spares no speed as he swings round the side of the motel, trusting to the darkness to alert him of any oncoming traffic on the short, single lane access road, and accelerates towards the exit. Even so he almost ploughs straight into the man that steps off the edge of the sidewalk at the corner of the building. There’s only the briefest moment in passing where he looks up and catches the gleam of eyes in the darkness and knows that he almost ran over an angel of the Lord.

Stupid angel should know to get out of the damned road, he thinks, as he hits the highway and drives hard in the direction of the plains.

 

\--

 

The next time Dean sees the archangel, he's ready for him. He has holy oil and a lighter, and a whole ocean’s worth of rage crashing in his breast.

Really, this should have been the very first thing he did, and as he’s laying down the ring of oil he chides himself for not thinking straight. For not thinking at all perhaps. If a monster is hunting you then trap it.

He has no blade with which to kill an archangel, but what he can do is buy himself some time.

When Michael follows him in to the old warehouse, there’s a look of weary acceptance on his face. Dean watches him from across the other side of the empty space, and wonders where his fear of God’s warriors went. The things this creature could do to him. The things it already has.

Michael knows the trap is there, Dean can read the knowledge of it in his eyes. Even so, the archangel steps forward, coming to a halt in the very centre of the dormant circle. For a split-second Dean wonders if he, as the first born, has some way around this trap, but then his colder survival instincts kick in and he flicks the Zippo to the floor, lighting the warehouse up in flickering orange and black.

“How’d you find me the first time?” he asks bluntly.

Michael sighs, looking down at the ring of flames, and then lifts his gaze back to Dean. He looks strangely tired, and Dean wonders what new trickery this is.

“I was sent directly back to you, by my Father,” Michael replies softly.

Dean nods slowly, processing this. He wants to ask if that means the big guy is back for good, but really, what difference has that ever made? He weighs it up against the body and soul of his brother, burning in hell, and finds that he doesn’t care.

“Stay away from me,” he says.

He leaves Michael standing in the burning ring of holy oil, and this time he doesn’t pull the fire switch, he just lets it burn.

 

\--

 

It buys him three weeks.

Dean makes his way into the city and almost immediately picks up a hunt. Except he’s not hunting any more. He’s done with that life now, finished with the blood and the death and constant threat of terrible things. Unfortunately that life is not done with him.

He leaves the bar not long after he notices that he’s being checked out. And not checked out in the good way either. Checked out by a group of people that are either really intent on mugging him - which wouldn’t be too far outside the realms of possibility considering how well he’s done at the tables tonight - or have some other reason for paying him a particularly weighty level of interest. They don’t seem the type to be inviting him to an orgy, and judging by some of the bigger guys, Dean’s kinda glad. Not really his type.

He leaves first, because the gang of them have settled in for the night to keep a watch on him, and it’s either get out now while the night is still young, or risk the city streets after midnight with this pack on his tail. As he steps out into the cold night air he glances up at the sky and notes the moon, hanging bright and almost full.

Of course. A pack indeed.

He heads further into the city, aiming for the blocks where the lights are even brighter in the dark and there are clubs with more than one entrance where he stands a chance of losing them. It’s a Saturday night and the streets are full of revellers out to find their first party. The air has a nip to it, and Dean stuffs his hands deep into his pockets, casting a discerning eye across the front of the clubs he passes, looking for dress codes lax enough to let him in. The subsonic pounding of music spills into the street, but isn’t enough to hide the prickle that raises the hairs on his neck and tells him that he’s still being trailed.

He dips into the second club he passes that looks as though it won’t turn him away, and heads straight onto the dance floor and out the other side. It’s the work of a moment to find the staff doors and slip through them, fast and confident, and then out into the back corridors. He’s lucky the place doesn’t have electronic passes on the inner doors, he’s been caught out by that before.

He passes through corridors piled with boxes, nods disinterestedly at the kid hauling crates of beer up from the back rooms, and because the hunter doesn’t hesitate neither does the kid. Dean moves on past him and follows the fire exit signs towards the back. The place has a rear exit that leads out into the small alley running along the back of the row, and that’s where the wolves find him. Clearly, they’ve tracked tricky prey before.

The woman is tall and broad shouldered, and the strength with which she slams him back against the wall is more than he could ever hope to overcome. He kicks hard at her ankles, trying to get a knee up to put it in her belly and drive her away, but her hands are vice-tight around his neck and when she leans in close, snarling in his face, it’s wolf-eyes that meet his. Her grip is so tight he can’t even draw in the breath to curse her out.

She’s joined by two of her packmates, large, shadowy figures that swing wide on either side of her, their fingers already tipped with long, deadly claws. The whole lot of them are old enough to control a partial turn with the moon not entirely full, and had he the air to consider it, Dean would realise just how much trouble he’s in.

They’re halfway through beating him to the ground when the door to the club opens, spilling heat and the rhythmic thud of music out into the alley, and bringing with it the rest of the pack. The leader is smaller, and when he kneels to lift Dean’s bloodied chin, the hunter finds himself looking up into dark, watchful eyes - still human - and knows that this wolf is older by far than all the rest.

“You should not have come here, Winchester,” the wolf lord says, and his voice has the soft assuredness of the boardroom exec, the easy tolerance of one who has but to nod and his every order is obeyed. “This city is not your hunting ground.”

Dean spits blood, clears his throat and finds his voice still hoarse from the crush of the woman’s grip. He can see the pack leader’s second standing off to the side in pretty skirt and top, unshivering even in the cold that lingers on the night air. She’s watching him, and watching the end of the alley, and Dean has one eye on her too because if he somehow gets rids of this alpha then she’ll be the one to direct the others back onto him. And because of that, he sees it when her eyes go wide, is ready when she takes a step back, calling for her pack leader’s attention.

“Kwang-min!”

That’s the only warning any of them receive.

Dean sees the flash of silver in the light of the single streetlamp that glows at the end of the alley, and at first he thinks it’s another hunter, perhaps someone local who knows how to deal with this pack. But then he sees the absolute certainty of the newcomer’s approach, and the almost casual economy of movement when he strikes that speaks of a the type of strength that is never denied. Before he even sees the other’s face he knows who it is, who it has to be. Only an angel is arrogant enough to fight like that and suffer no harm for it.

Michael allows none of the pack to escape. So swift is he that not one of them has time to really appreciate the depths of the danger in which they have suddenly found themselves. It’s possible that most of them don’t even recognise him for what he truly is. He moves through them, unhurried but certain, and Dean sees the silver and lightning flash of his sword bright in the gloom.

It’s over almost before the pack has time to fully process its fate, and Dean is pushing himself awkwardly to his feet just as the angel’s shadow falls over him. He has time to wonder if he should expect a blow, or some other form of aggression, considering the last time he saw this creature it was through the flickering flames of a tailor-made and thoroughly humiliating trap. But then the archangel’s hand finds his arm and helps him to his feet with a grip that’s most likely only unintentionally hard.

Dean looks up from his painfully hunched-over position, and squints through a swollen eye at him. “Typical,” he spits. “Never actually there when you’re needed.”

“I apologise,” Michael murmurs, and Dean jerks away before the archangel’s considering gaze can become a healing touch.

“Don’t do that. I don’t need your help.”

He’ll be damned before he accepts help off this creep. Damned again, that is.

Dean half-stalks, mostly staggers, away down the alley, heading back toward the main road and leaving behind himself the bodies of the dead werewolves, and, standing amidst the blood, the archangel that killed them.

 

\--

 

His intention was to get back to his motel room and patch himself up, then throw his kit into the Impala and get the hell out of dodge. It doesn’t work out like that. By the time Dean is fumbling for the keys to his room, he’s feeling light-headed and shaky, enough that it very briefly occurs to him that maybe he ought to get checked out for poisons or something. It’s a crazy thought, but he can’t quite work out what the shake in his muscles is, beyond a shock reaction, and surely, _surely_ he’s past that kind of thing by now?

The motel room is just that, a single room with a tiny bathroom and no kitchenette. It was all his money could buy at the time and he wants out, had intended to use tonight to pick up enough cash to buy better lodgings and more alcohol. An awkward patting tells him that the cash he did win is still in his pocket, and he laughs at that. One thing at least managed to go right.

There’s blood on his shirt from his nose and the cut on his brow where the werewolf used her fist to split his eyebrow right open, and the pain every time he breathes tells him that her two burly friends have broken at least three of his ribs. By the buzzing illumination of the bathroom light he slowly applies needle and cotton swab, alcohol and then bandages to himself. He shakes through the pain of it, spits out whisky and blood, tossing aside the idea of a doctor, and eventually, some time close to 3am, lays himself down on the bed and is unconcious almost before he has fully finished his outwards breath.

When he wakes up it’s to the pale wash of daylight through the open curtains and the sound of a city having awoken long before. The miserable grey day casts the figure sitting beneath the window into a shadowed silhouette, until Dean blinks and squints in its direction. He makes a sharp move to sit up, realising at the same time as his self-preservation screams at him to mind his broken ribs, that he feels no pain at all. He glances down at the blood that still stains his shirt, at the rents and tears in his clothing that make him look more hobo than hunter, and realises that every bruise is gone. The split in his brow is healed and his eye blinks freely, no longer swollen.

Michael is reading the motel brochure, his long fingers turning the pages slowly, his face a mask of careful consideration, as though the trite, glossy pages hold the same meaning as the scriptures of old. Dean stares at him, sat there so easily, so completely and unashamedly inevitable, and wonders briefly if this is how Sam felt every time Lucifer showed his face in his dreams. It’s a perfectly hilarious symmetry really. His own personal devil.

“All right,” Dean says. “All right. What the fuck do you want from me?”

Michael looks up at him then, and for a split-second Dean sees behind the mask of his expression, beyond the cold steel of the dutiful son, to the flash of something fractured and uncertain below. It’s there and then gone so suddenly that he wonders if he’s still suffering the effects of head trauma. But of course he can’t be, because Michael has clearly sorted that out for him during the night.

Dean should be creeped out by that. By the archangel’s relentless tracking, his forced entry into Dean’s place of refuge, as shitty as it is, and at his healing without permission. Requirement for consent clearly doesn’t extend to the laying on of hands, but Dean supposes he should probably know that by now. It should be creepy, but mostly he just feels tired. He thinks again of how the world had swum around him last night, at how the shaking wouldn’t go away, and the cold wouldn’t stop biting, even in this oven of a motel room. He was probably dying or similar, he understands that now.

Michael is staring at him, giving him the silent treatment, out of caution or contrariness Dean has no clue. He hasn’t answered the question, and Dean wonders how long he’ll sit there and just stare, waiting for Dean to do something. Probably for as long as it takes, judging by every single angel he’s ever met.

“You want me to punish you?” Dean rasps.

Michael’s eyes burn unnaturally blue in the dismal lighting, catching the pale sunlight of the gloomy day in sparkling azure. It’s unnerving, and any beauty it might possess is ruined by the absolute threat the archangel represents. He inclines his head in regal acknowledgement, and if Dean expected bitterness, or the sly twist of arrogance to his lips that he remembers so well from their previous encounter, then he is thoroughly disappointed.

“My Father wills it, and I am an embodiment of my Father’s desires,” the archangel says.

“You better hope not, buddy.”

Dean shakes his head at the archangel’s querying expression, and then lies back on the bed. He stares up at the ceiling and feels his shirt, stiff with dried blood, crinkle and scratch against his skin. This is his life now.

He closes his eyes, and tries to go back to sleep.

 

\--

 

After that the archangel rides with him.

Dean doesn’t know what else to do. He has no archangel blade to settle this, no more holy oil, and knows of no Enochian sigil strong enough to banish the prince of all angels. What he knows is that he doesn’t want this, wants absolutely nothing to do with God’s will or Michael’s interpretation of it. Punish the prince of Heaven? Dean doesn’t care about any of that any more. He’s through with it, he’s done.

Michael rides in the Impala in solemn silence, so at home in the beautiful, dark-haired vessel he’s stolen that he can lounge against the window and maintain both poise and dignity. Dean finds that he hates him for it.

He turns the Impala back north and west, heads on autopilot for the familiar, and doesn’t know what else he should do even when it occurs to him where he’s going.

Michael dips his head, looks up at the sky, and says, “It will rain tonight.”

Dean glances at him, shakes his head once, and continues to drive.

 

 


	2. II.

**II.**

 

On the far shore of the lake a pair of loons are calling to one another, and Dean cracks open a beer as he leans back against the Impala to rest. The afternoon has faded into the twilight of evening, and the heat has gone out of the air. The dark paint of the car is still warm against the back of his thighs, and he pauses to enjoy it. This peace, with the thrum of the highway obscured by the gradient of the hill behind them, is something he’s missed. The city has its charms, but Dean has always loved the stillness of the outdoors, far from human habitation.

Even Sam enjoyed sitting by the lake, a cooler of beer between them, sometimes a rod too if anywhere nearby was hiring them out. Fishing was more Dean’s style, but his little brother could be moved to it if enough wheedling pressure was applied. The weight of his brother’s absence is a pain that clenches just behind his breastbone, and makes his throat tight and aching.

At the edge of the lake the archangel is crouching, sleeves rolled up, fingertips just touching the surface of the water. Dean has no idea what he’s doing, cannot honestly say that he cares. He takes a pull of his beer and thinks of all the things he’d thought to do that weren’t this. He’d had plans of course, broken and hazy, but even standing in the fall-out of the destruction of his life, he’d maintained the instinct to prepare, to move on, to tackle the next obstacle.

Setting up with Bobby, working in his yard fixing up the machines that came through, that had been an option. Hell, he’d even put serious thought into finding Lisa, seeing what she thought of him, if the offer still stood. Being some kind of father to Ben, though God alone knew what would come of it. How long it would take before it all caught up with him. But perhaps he could have used them, their normalcy, their day to day needs. Lisa’s warmth, Ben’s need for a role model, he could have used that as an anchor, as a shield against everything he’s ever been or done or seen.

In the face of reality, none of it had mattered. Dean had hit the nearest town, the cheapest liquor store, and he’d drunk himself into numb oblivion. It might have been a predictable and entirely understandable reaction to watching his little brother sacrifice himself to an eternity of very real torment and being unable to do a damned thing to avert it, but even so Dean knows he failed. Again. He could have, he _should_ have done better.

And now, with this feathered dick trailing his every move, squawking on about Divine Justice and punishment, and the will of God the Almighty, every plan he could ever have considered is thoroughly shot through.

“Hey,” he calls down to the angel at the waterline. “Hey, you.”

Michael looks up at him, and lifts his hand from the water. A perfect symmetry of rings ripple out from where he was touching, and the water beneath glitters with the flash and dance of tiny fish. The angel regards him with absolute sincerity.

Dean thinks, _I’m not giving you what you want, you goddamn bastard son of a bitch._ “Free my brother,” he says instead.

Michael flicks water from his fingertips and rises slowly to his feet. His expression is unreadable, grave or simply uncaring, it’s hard to tell. “I cannot,” he replies.

At once, Dean is furious. What utter bullshit. “What do you mean, why not? You’re an archangel for chrissake!”

Michael nods once in acknowledgement, and for a moment his eyes slide closed. His lack of anger cools Dean’s temper like nothing else can, and replaces it instead with a twist of dread.

“I can no more free Sam than I can free my own brother.”

And Dean believes him. There’s something horribly defeated about Michael’s tone, and the calmness of his features, as though he imposes serenity upon himself against his natural inclination. The idea of an archangel mastering himself gives Dean pause. If Lucifer is ice then Michael must be fire, he thinks, and wonders at what storm brews beneath that surface of perfect calm.

Michael opens his eyes and when he meets Dean’s gaze, his own narrows just slightly. Dean knows that the grief and the desperation are showing on his face, and that the archangel has seen it.

“I am bound to you, Dean,” Michael says quietly. “And so too is my influence.”

“Then I’m telling you to use your damned influence to free Sam!” Dean demands.

The quiet is broken by the cry of the loons and a sudden rush of traffic passing by above up the slope. If there’s regret in the archangel’s eyes then Dean cannot see it.

“It is not within my power to free our brothers,” Michael replies. “Not even at your order. I serve a higher master.”

“And this is Heaven’s will, is it?” Dean asks.

For a second, the archangel pauses, as though considering his answer. Eventually he replies, and his voice is slow, his choice of words careful. “My Father gave me a single duty, to accept punishment from you. He has moved on now, and I no longer know where He is.” For a beat more, Michael hesitates. “I have not yet returned to Heaven.”

If the angel is expecting a reward for his honesty then he is to be sorely disappointed. Dean laughs, gripping the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Everything is so messed up, so completely and utterly ridiculous.

“What amuses you?” Michael asks, slow irritation spreading across his perfect features.

“They don’t know you’re back then?” Dean doesn’t wait for a reply. “You just skipped out on them and came straight back to find me and do what daddy told you to do, that it?”

It’s a definite scowl that appears on the archangel’s face. Father’s orders or not, Michael will not tolerate being mocked. “I obeyed my Father’s direct command, as is right.”

Dean stares at him, and understanding is sudden and complete. The prince of angels has lost his place in Heaven at his Father’s command. The prince, the general who fought at the last great battle and did worse than simply lose. Who lost so thoroughly that even death would have been an improvement on the outcome. Heaven must be in an uproar. Heaven must be furious.

“I should turn you over to them,” Dean bites out.

Michael goes still, and he realises then how close to the mark that cuts. Or perhaps if the archangel considers being turned over to the great machine of Heaven a punishment, then how deeply in trouble Michael must really be.

“If that is your choice,” Michael says stiffly.

Dean snorts, scowls, and with a flick of his wrist tosses his empty bottle into the parking area’s trash can. He pushes himself upright and opens the driver side door. “Get in the damned car.”

He’s tossed his bag back onto the rear seats, checked his phone, and started the engine, and only then does Michael move to join him. They pull out in silence, and Michael doesn’t say another word until they hit town several hours later.

 

\--

 

He’s on the roof, Dean’s pretty sure of it.

It’s two days later and Dean has found them a small self-catering place in a little Podunk town several hours drive from anywhere.  Dean is mostly indifferent to its lack of charm - it has a liquor store that doesn’t ask questions and that’s good enough for him. The archangel has taken to watching him, a thoroughly unnerving habit that he has no idea how to break him of because cursing and insults appear to be having no discernable effect. It’s as though Michael is waiting for him to submit by way of boring him into action, something that experience should have taught the angel will never work. They’ve been through something similar to this, albeit with far more blood and relentless horror already.

The archangel has become a silent, watchful presence, never much saying anything, but always doing something just slightly _off_. For all that he’s supposed to be one of the good guys - a monumental lie if there ever was one - and therefore most likely to be in tune with humanity, the reality of it is that Michael oscillates between a relaxed familiarity with his vessel, and a detachment that’s outright unnerving. Sometimes he forgets that he’s supposed to be playing human, and as good at that as Dean knows he can be, when he doesn’t put the act on, which is most of the time these days it seems, he can be genuinely creepy.

He doesn’t always blink, for one thing. He doesn’t use furniture properly for another. Michael stands and surveys, where any normal person would sit down and chat, or sit down and eat, or just damned well sit down and not stand there staring like a goddamned freak.

And then there’s this. Dean should be pleased that the archangel isn’t hovering in the corner or prowling around the corridors unnerving people, but at the same time when he doesn’t know where the angel is he can’t deny that it makes him antsy. Not knowing where the all-powerful killing machine with the unhealthy interest in punishment and self-flagellation has gotten himself to has become Dean’s latest bugbear. It’s a survival instinct kicking in he tells himself. Besides, the last thing he wants is the girl on the front desk calling in the cops because the weirdo pretty-boy stalking the corridors at all hours is making her nervous. He makes Dean nervous, so it would be an entirely understandable reaction.

The motel has an offshoot row of single storey rooms that branches out along the rear of the main building, surrounded on all sides by the parking lot, and ringed around by the blank and shadowed faces of tall warehouses. It’s hardly the choicest of lodgings, but for the purposes for which it’s needed it will suffice. There’s a set of steel stairs that gives maintenance access to the roof, and Dean steps outside, locks the door and makes his way up these as quietly as he can. He has a half-full bottle of beer grasped loosely around the stem and he drinks from it as he makes his slow way upwards.

It’s chilly on the roof, the night having drawn in dark and cold, and the area is lit by the orange glow of security lamps. Someone has left a pair of metal camping chairs up here and they sit forgotten, flaking paint and rust off to one side. The archangel is standing on the low wall that rings the top of the building, his hands pushed into his pockets in a curiously human gesture that takes Dean a little by surprise. He pauses at the top of the staircase, gauging the angel’s mood, wondering why the hell it is he’s even come up here in the first place.

Michael doesn’t react to his presence. Dean takes a few steps forward, swinging wide so he can catch a glimpse of the archangel’s expression. The angel is standing with his eyes closed, his head tilted back slightly, as though he listens to something far-off that Dean cannot perceive. The barest of breezes tousles the dark hair across his forehead. Thinking _fuck it_ , Dean strolls up next to him, swings his legs over the cold brick and sits down at his side, feet dangling out over the concrete below.

Close up, the archangel smells of incense and something sweet that Dean can’t identify. It surprises him. He’d expected cologne and sweat, the human scents of an angelic vessel. But not Michael. The archangel smells of ritual and magic, and Dean wonders where the hell he’s been going, and what he’s been doing. He’s not always there riding along in the Impala, but when he does leave he doesn’t go for long. Dean swirls the remnants of his beer and wonders what would happen if he were to shove the angel off the roof right here and now. If he’d even stumble, or if he’d stand like a mountain, implacable and immoveable. Dean suspects the latter.

“You drink too much,” Michael murmurs, so softly that he barely catches the words.

For a second Dean blinks in surprise, then his mouth is moving before he’s fully processed the thought. “Yeah, and your damned family’s the reason why.”

Michael breathes out a long, slow sigh of breath, and Dean glares into the darkness, telling himself not to bait the celestial killing machine. Except he doesn’t feel particularly afraid. In truth he doesn’t really feel a great deal of anything these days except tired. Goading the firstborn son of God into some kind of reaction is a dangerous game wherein he has nothing left to lose.

Dean lets his head fall back, beer clasped loosely between his fingers, and looks up at the night sky. The lights of the town eclipse most of what there is to see, but here and there the strongest stars still shine through. He picks out Orion by the hunter’s belt, and then gives up. Next to him the archangel is silent.

“What are you even doing up here anyway?” he asks.

It takes less time than he expects for the archangel to reply. “Listening,” Michael says softly.

“To what?”

“To my siblings.”

Dean looks up and sideways at him, at the angel’s closed eyes and shadowed features. There’s a tightness around the corner of his eyes that speaks of some discomfort, emotional or physical it’s hard to say.

“What’s the word on the celestial radio then?” he asks, surprised to find himself curious. After what happened up there he knows there’s been trouble, Castiel had said as much before he’d left Dean to fend for himself. Dean hadn’t registered a great deal beyond _not my problem any more_ though. It’s been a while since he thought of Cas, he acknowledges. Longer too since he prayed to him. Besides, Castiel no longer answers, and Dean can take care of his own messes.

“They are in pain,” the archangel says. The way he says it catches at Dean’s attention. The angel’s tone has something of bitterness in it, something of disbelief and horror.

“What’s wrong with them?”

Michael shakes his head once. “They grieve, and they despair. They suffer for all that has happened.”

Dean blinks in response. The beer is nothing, but the whisky he drank earlier is making him slow and tired. His thoughts are chasing themselves in circles, and he can’t think beyond the great cosmic joke of it all. He wonders if it makes him a monster to feel nothing for the suffering of others, or if it simply makes him human.

The archangel breathes out a long, slow breath, and the air is filled with the curl of steam. Dean watches the billow of it roll out into the open air until it dissipates into nothing. Michael burns hot. He remembers it from the steel in the angel’s grip, from the time he leaned in to threaten him and breathed fire across Dean’s cheek. Fire purifies, so they say.

The angels are suffering, so the _archangel_ says. “Well, maybe you all deserve it,” Dean says.

“Yes,” Michael replies, and bows his head.

Dean tosses his bottle into the open air, watching it tumble end over end in a great curve, until it shatters into a thousand fragments in the open skip below. He leaves the angel staring at the glitter of broken glass, bright in the reflected street lights, and makes his unsteady way back to the motel room.

 

\--

 

Dean is at the liquor store the day the angels come for him.

He’s taken a liking to a particular brew that’s cheap and potent and nearly always in stock. The guy behind the counter bags the bottles for him, and Dean gives him a tired smile that’s all remembered charm. He glances up to meet the man’s eyes and sees him looking over Dean’s shoulder towards the door. His expression makes old hunter instincts kick in, and Dean’s hands suddenly itch to free the .45 he carries tucked in his pants. Instead he takes the bag from the cashier’s hands and pulls it to the edge of the counter. Maybe, whatever this is, he can just walk on out of here and leave it behind.

“Dean Winchester.”

It’s not a question, and Dean doesn’t need to turn round to hear the squeak of polished shoes or see the drab grey suits. He can picture them already, a lineup of interchangeable office conformity, sharpened round the edges by the glint of a mercury blade. He lowers his head, and sighs softly. His temples have started to throb and that’s a sure sign of Heavenly intervention. Of course it’s a possibility that these mooks have been sent here by Castiel, but Dean knows better than that. It never works like that for people like him.

He turns and then smiles, because there’s six of them. Four men, two women. They all wear the same look of cold disapproval, and for just a moment he’s impressed because six angels to one human is overkill of the highest order. Then again, he and his brother did seal two archangels in a magical box and throw away the key. Perhaps someone is finally starting to take the Winchesters seriously.

“Hi guys,” he says. “I’m guessing you’re not here for the mixed case discount.”

The leader is a tall, white-blond man so pale his blush of anger could never be hidden, and Dean knows right then he’s in trouble. If they start out that angry it really doesn’t bode well. He takes a step back, feeling the edge of the counter press into his spine and doesn’t even bother going for his gun. In this fight it’ll do him no good whatsoever.

The angels move in and the guy behind the counter makes an uneasy protest, knowing without having to be told that this group is nothing but trouble. “Get outta here,” Dean throws back over his shoulder, and, keeping his eyes on the approaching angels, listens to the retreating footsteps fade. If only getting out of here was that simple for him.

“Dean Winchester,” the leader says again. “You have been sentenced to death and eternal damnation by the authority of Hea-”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence.

Michael is not there, and then, very suddenly, he is. The archangel manifests in the midst of the group of startled angels, and is moving before they have even fully registered his presence. Dean sees the flash of an angelic blade, and has just enough time to duck and shield his eyes before the first of the angels screams its death cry. He scrambles around the end of the counter, hearing the scuffle of feet and the smashing of glass. The scent of alcohol fills the air, and Dean can feel what must be blood trickling from his ears as the angels shriek in their deadly voices. He cringes into a ball behind the dubious safety of the cashier’s island, eyes screwed tightly shut and hands clamped to his ears.

It’s mere seconds before it’s over. Dean knows it from the manner in which the world goes dark through his scrunched-up eyelids, and from the way the floor beneath his feet stops rumbling. Truly an archangel brings something to a brawl that no other supernatural being can quite match. He opens his eyes and shakes his head to clear the ringing in his ears. Coloured spots still dance in his vision, and he lets himself just listen to his surroundings as he waits for his sight to properly return. There’s no hurry, he has no doubt that the archangel has triumphed.

The soft tinkle of falling glass and dripping liquid is the only sound, and Dean squints into the dark. The angels’ fight has blown out every bulb in the place and now the only illumination comes from the lights in the parking lot. This is not a busy liquor store, and it’s already late. There had been no-one in the parking lot when he arrived, and anyone passing by, anyone _normal_ passing by, would have started running at the first hint of the angels’ ugly voices on the air.

Slowly, Dean levers himself to his feet and peers over the counter. The liquor store is destroyed. Broken glass and collapsed shelves line the area, wine and spirits all pooling in an unattractive mess of spilled liquid that sheets the floor in a dirty brown. Six dead angels lie broken and bent all around, and there, kneeling in the centre of the carnage, is the archangel.

Dean can see the glint of his blade still clutched in one hand, gleaming mercury and gold in the light from outside. Michael is down on one knee, hunched over with one hand pressed to the floor to steady himself. He’s facing away, so Dean cannot catch his expression, but he can read tension in the muscles of the angel’s shoulders.

“Here to save the day again,” Dean rasps, then coughs, finding his throat hoarse. Angels, he can never quite get used to the way they mess with reality.

Michael does not reply, and Dean moves closer, stepping carefully across the shards of broken glass. Now he’s up and looking around, he can see the archangel’s shoulders twitching, and hear the harsh scrape of his breath. For a shocked second he thinks the archangel might be crying. No, he amends, not crying. _Laughing_.

Dean doesn’t like the sound of that. In his experience the laughter of angels is entirely too full of cruelty. He grimaces around at the wreckage of the store and wonders how long it’s going to be before the guy that went out the back calls this in - the police are probably already en route. He steadies himself on the counter and blinks. The paper bag containing his beer sits unscathed on the very edge of the scuffed plastic. Small miracles.

“Look, much as I appreciate the whole existential hilarity of all this, we need to leave. Soon as you’ve gotten yourself together.” Dean reaches out, hooks the handles of the bag and then turns to the archangel. “Michael. We need to go.”

The angel is still laughing, that odd, scraping noise that puts Dean completely on edge. It’s never a good sign when the all-powerful megalomaniac won’t stop giggling. He frowns, takes a step around to the side to try and catch the archangel’s expression. “....Michael?”

The archangel is staring at the floor. A sudden trickle of liquid glistens on his face, curving a path down across his jaw to drip from the point of his chin and on to the back of his hand. At first Dean thinks, no, not laughter after all. _Tears_. And then he sees the darkness of the liquid against the angel’s skin.

“Shit.”

He crosses the space between them in two strides, going down on one knee next to the angel. Michael’s eyes burn that strange, feverish blue in the dim light, and Dean fights the urge to back away. There’s blood on the archangel’s lips, and what Dean had taken for posturing is in fact the tense crouch of a body curled in around a wound. He can’t see it, but the arm the archangel has pressed around his belly tells enough of the story for Dean to guess.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demands. “Did they stab you?”

It doesn’t make sense. Archangels can’t be killed by anything but another archangel’s blade or an act of their Father. Michael isn’t replying. He reaches awkwardly for Dean with the arm that had been wrapped around his midriff, and Dean pulls away slightly when he sees the dark blood that coats the angel’s skin. He doesn’t understand what’s going on here, how an archangel can be wounded like this, enough to wheeze and gasp, enough to _bleed_.

Wounded or not, the angel’s grip is like a vice on his shoulder, and Dean winces in pain. He’s a moment away from trying to twist out of the hold, when the angel’s grip shifts, and he reaches instead for Dean’s forehead. Dean knows this gesture, has had it used on him far too many times to welcome it.

The world twists around them, and with a ghostly flicker of unseen wings, the archangel slips them sideways through reality, and away from this place.

 

\--

 

Dean stumbles when they land, caught off balance by the unexpected weight of the archangel in his arms. Michael struggles to right himself, using Dean’s chest as leverage to regain his feet. He’s heavy and slighter taller than Dean, and when Dean catches him he feels the bulk of muscle under the angel’s shirt. No geeky office clerk this angel. It makes maneuvering him more difficult, but the archangel is helping to stumble his way across to the bed.

 Michael has brought them back to the motel, and Dean spares a thought for the curtains, knowing that the liquor store is only a twenty minute walk away. He grimaces when he catches the lilt of sirens in the distance, helping the angel sit himself awkwardly on the edge of the bed, and then crossing to draw the curtains just as the flash of blue lights passes by outside. That guy in the liquor store knows him by face now, and will probably have caught his name when that damned angel said it out loud.

“Michael,” he says, voice urgent. “We can’t stay here. Can you move?”

“Not to fly, not again,” the archangel grimaces, and Dean looks at his hunched over form in alarmed confusion. Michael squints up at him from his place on the bed, blood on his lips and spread dark across his belly. The urge to ask questions is stifled by long experience of being pursued, and Dean just nods. There’ll be time to work out what’s going on later. He dips into the bathroom, grabs the medical supplies and kneels down in front of the angel.

“Let me see.”

Michael stares at him, clearly taken aback by the request. His eyes are glassy with pain, and his breathing is ragged. “Look man,” Dean says. “Either show me or don’t, I don’t really care. But I am leaving in five minutes and if you’re coming with me then I don’t want you bleeding out all over my seats, you got me?”

Michael laughs softly, a horrible rasp of sound, and shakes his head. “I will not bleed over your upholstery, Dean Winchester. I swear this.”

Dean grunts. “I’ll hold you to that. Here, put this on, and if we get stopped try to cover your chest up.” He tosses his jacket into the angel’s lap and then turns away to gather his things.

 

\--

 

Despite his concerns, they are not stopped on their way out of town. Dean turns the Impala onto the road that leads east and comes off the main highway as soon as is physically possible, sticking to the back routes where they’ll be harder to trace. Michael sits in the passenger seat, eyes closed, head pressed against the headrest. His expression is the enforced slackness of someone trying to conceal their pain, but Dean’s been a fighter long enough to read the pale skin and tension that he hides so badly. Forty miles out of town he looks sideways at the archangel and frowns.

“All right then, out with it. What the hell happened back there?”

Michael is slow to respond. He wets his lips, then pauses as though the taste of blood surprises him.

“Michael.”

“I heard you, Dean,” the angel replies. “I heard you.”

He shifts in the seat, opening his eyes and pushing himself further upright. A breath of air passes in a hiss between his lips, and then he laughs, as though the pain both surprises and amuses him. Dean scowls at him, unnerved despite his every intention not to let this bastard unsettle him.

“Did they catch you by surprise or something?”

“No,” Michael replies shortly. “No they did not. My dear brother was doing you an honour, Dean. Six seraphs to be your honour guard.”

“ _My_ honour guard?”

Michael nods, licking his lips again, and looks out the window at the darkness racing past. “You are still my true vessel, Dean Winchester. That has its uses.”

That’s not something Dean wants to hear, certainly not as a companion to the news of another angel with too many plans and not enough respect for humans. “You said you didn’t go back, that they don’t even know you’re out.”

“And so they do not. And because I was fast, they still do not.”

Dean eyes him carefully, gauging the angel’s mood. “Not concerned about ganking your own siblings then?”

For a second it seems as though Michael has a reply for him, and Dean braces for it. But the moment stretches and then is past, as the archangel very clearly, and very deliberately bites his tongue. Dean isn’t entirely sure what to make of that. Even he would say he deserved a reaction for that one.

“I did that which was necessary,” Michael says, and the low, dangerous tone of his voice makes it clear that he doesn’t appreciate Dean’s thoughts on the matter.

“So you killed them to prevent them telling tales. Who sent them in the first place, and why after me?”

Michael shifts, angling himself to take the weight off his wound, and shrugs. “Raphael-”

“Raphael? What, as in the turtle?” He can’t help it, he knows damned well who and what Raphael is, but he doesn’t want it, can’t deal with another of the overpowered bastards being on the loose out there.

“He is an archangel,” Michael says, either ignoring the weak attempt at humour or immune to it. “He’s most likely searching for a way to free me. I suspect he thought that negotiating with you was his best option.”

Dean remembers Raphael, oh he remembers Raphael only too well. He can still picture the steel in the archangel's eyes, and hear the warning and the promise of violence underscoring the low growl of his voice. “Wait a second, even though this guy’s always been around out there, it's only now that you’re out for the count he’s stepped up?” At Michael’s nod Dean continues. “After everything what the hell makes him think I’d be any more likely to deal with him than you directly?”

Michael laughs quietly and shakes his head. “By negotiate, I mean invite you to sit down and listen while he told you his plans for you. My little brother has never truly understood the meaning of freedom of choice.”

“Well that one runs in the damned family,” Dean snaps.

“You should be glad to serve Heaven, Dean.”

Unimpressed, Dean throws a snarl sideways at the angel. “Don’t start with me.”

They drive in silence for a minute, Michael smiling just slightly, Dean pushing down hard on the urge to slam on the brakes and kick the archangel to the kerb. If he didn’t think the bastard would just turn up again a few weeks later he’d be more tempted. As it is, he needs to know more about why there are apparently angel escort squads out looking for him.

“So, seraphs then. They really did a number on you.”

“Yes,” Michael says.

Dean gives it a moment, then, when the angel continues to stare out of the window, presses, “Why couldn’t you take them?”

Michael does not reply. Dean can see a multitude of responses crossing the angel’s features, being considered and then discarded as wrong for some reason. “If you don’t give me some answers soon, I am going to pull this car over and leave you out here. And then I’m going to go tell Cas where you are so he can pass a message on.”

“Do _not_ do that!” Michael turns to him with sudden ferocity in his eyes, fury in his expression. “You will not do that, Dean Winchester. You will have no contact with Castiel unless I permit it.”

Dean glances sideways at him, curious that the mention of contact with Castiel has only just become a problem. And then, despite his surprise, he laughs. It’s slow, knowing laughter, intended to convey just how little traction he feels the archangel has on this matter. “You think you can order me around, buddy? I thought that wasn’t the point any more. I thought you were here to do as _I_ tell you to do. You given up on daddy’s will now too?”

He’s surprised when Michael retreats. The angel goes still and pale, as though Dean has cracked him across the cheek with an unexpected blow. Dean has one eye on him, one on the road, ready for the archangel to try something, so he sees it when Michael pushes back into his seat, the anger replaced by something cool and blank and distant. He waits, wondering what the angel will do.

“If that is what you will, Dean Winchester, to hand me over to Heaven for their judgement, then I will submit.”

Dean stares at him for a moment too long, then has to adjust his course sharply to avoid going off the edge of the road. For a full minute he just drives, letting the angel sweat and trying to work out what the hell he does want from all this. Having an archangel forcing itself into submission to his every whim should be some kind of godsend. In fact, if Michael has been telling the truth, then it literally _is_ a godsend. Dean should be all over that. He should be exacting his vengeance, doling out punishment and satisfying his rage on the archangel’s vessel. Except Michael has nothing to offer him. The one thing Dean wants is apparently the one thing Michael cannot give him.

He glares at the road ahead, and wonders what kind of trap he’s fallen into this time.

“Why aren’t you healing?” he asks instead.

Michael waits for a moment before he responds, as if making sure that Dean will be satisfied with his answer and thereby absolve the archangel of any further dealings with this topic. Then he shrugs slightly, and glances away. Dean can read the reluctance of a powerful fighter in the gesture, one not used to being forced into revealing weakness like this. He’s kinda familiar with it.

“My powers are limited while I walk in this vessel,” the archangel says eventually. “It is easier to damage, and does not deal as well with any...expression of my abilities.”

Dean nods. “Huh,” he replies. He knows full well that the angel is lying to him. He can’t say how he knows, but there’s something off about the answer that makes him think there’s more to it than just that. “Can you heal? What do you need?”

“Rest,” Michael says immediately. “Time in which I am not required to fight.”

How very human of you, Dean thinks. And then it occurs to him that even had he wanted to, he couldn’t dump the archangel now anyway. If Raphael really is sending seraphs out to bring him in, then Dean can’t fight them off on his own. If Sam were here then- he cuts that thought off immediately. Sam is gone, and Castiel is no longer answering his phone. Despite his threats, Dean hasn’t heard from Castiel since Stull. Even if he’d gone with handing Michael over to him, he wouldn’t have had the first clue about how to get him to answer.

Goddamn angels. Bastard feathered freaks.

“Fine,” Dean says. “Rest we can do.”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	3. III.

**III.**

 

Michael is praying, Dean is certain of it.

He pauses outside the closed door of the archangel’s room and tilts his head to listen. The whisper of the angel’s voice is piercing and sibilant, wrong in a way he’d never have expected from anything that called heaven home. It’s been a long time since Dean was a kid, with a kid’s notions of right and wrong, heaven and hell. Even back then he’d understood hell better than he’d grasped heaven. Heaven had been a fairytale of clouds and fluffy wings, the kind of place a mother might go to if she were taken before her time. What he’s learnt since then even he hadn’t predicted. A total absence had been easier to believe than the steel and cold disdain of the reality.

Michael is sick. Sick enough that Dean isn’t entirely sure what to do with him. He put the archangel to bed the moment they arrived and has spent the last five days at this out of the way cabin motel listening to him suffer as quietly as the angel possibly can. The wound across Michael’s stomach runs from the edge of his ribcage down to his groin. It’s not as deep as it could be, and Dean’s not sure if that’s because he’s already partially healed it, or because the blow was a glancing one. Regardless, it’s causing the angel pain that goes beyond the mere physical. And for all that Michael forces himself to suffer in silence, Dean can see, and hear, quite clearly how bad it is.

In the beginning, Dean had tried to help the angel tend the wound as he would a normal human, which is how he knows the extent of the damage. Michael had tolerated his attempts with careful patience, watching Dean with something akin to fascination as the hunter worked. The wound is an ugly mess of bruised and cauterised skin, where the swipe of an angel blade has both scored the flesh and seared it closed. Dean is entirely unsurprised by the pain it’s causing. What he doesn’t understand is why it’s not getting better.

“Michael,” he says. He tries to sound firm, and not cautious, as though the very idea of what he’s doing here helping the creature that damned his family isn’t utterly preposterous. As though it doesn’t make him a traitor to his own blood. On the other side of the door, the whispering voice stills. There’s a brief pause, and Dean doesn’t wait for an invite. He pushes open the door and steps inside.

Michael is levering himself slowly to his feet, fist bunched in the sheets at the foot of the bed as he braces himself. He half-turns as Dean comes inside, grimacing.

“You look like shit,” Dean mutters, taken aback despite himself.

Michael’s lips twist in a smile laden with arrogance, the same one he’d forced on to John’s mouth when he was using Dean’s own father to spout his fascist plans. Dean feels his breathing go shallow with the sudden flood of anger the memory provokes. He’d thought he was past that incandescent, white-hot rage, had thought it washed away by everything that’s happened to him. But no, it’s there in a split-second, a rise and rush of fury that lifts him and squares his shoulders.

“What can I do for you, Dean?” Michael rasps. The effort to maintain a semblance of his normal poise clearly costs him, and Dean watches as the pain of straightening up pulls at all the tiny muscles in the angel’s stolen face. He can smell blood, and can see it on the archangel’s fingers, badly wiped clean.

“Nothing,” he says, and turns to leave.

Michael takes a step towards him, and Dean’s shoulders tense, knowing somehow that the angel is reaching for him. “ _ Don’t touch me _ ,” he warns him, and when the footsteps pause he knows he was right. He’s out the door and closing it behind him before the angel can do anything more to provoke him, but he still catches the sound of his name, and the note of something that sounds a lot like desperation in the archangel’s voice.

Dean finds, to his satisfaction, that he does not care.

 

\--

 

The midsummer evening is long and afire with the thrum of cicadas. The surrounding fields are abuzz with them, filling the air with a haze of sound that blankets the senses and makes every movement slow and reluctant. The Spring Pines guest house is a converted barn in the middle of rolling fields, far off the beaten track. The sun-bleached sign that had led them to this place a week ago rests in the lengthening shadows of the fading day, nestled in the low hedge that guards the run-up to the drive. Dean sits on the porch of the barn, looking up towards the main house, and turns a glass of whiskey slowly between his fingers.

The elderly couple that own both these buildings are in their back room watching television; he can hear the tinny rise and fall of electronic voices cutting across the stillness of the evening. They’re old, and sweet, and unassuming. They keep chickens and grow their own food, and the woman smiled fondly at the two handsome young men that turned up to hire the guest barn. She’d had them sit on the porch of the main house with her husband while she aired out the guest house for their use.

_ Don’t get many visitors come round here _ , the old man had told them.  _ Used to be our son lived in the barn. I converted that for him myself you know _ .

Dean had been impressed by how well Michael had hidden his pain and pretended to listen. And then had felt like strangling him when the archangel had told the man he had a good son, a faithful son. Had wanted to curse at the old man’s smile and swell of innocent pride.

They’ve been here a week, with Dean silent and watchful, while Michael pants and sweats and prays in the barn’s bedroom. Dean sleeps on the couch, when he sleeps at all, and ignores the knowing smiles of the elderly woman when she brings them a basket of milk and bread in the mornings. She means well, and he doesn’t want her to see the broken, boiling hatred in his eyes. Not for her, never for people like her. But for a world that expects him to keep on going, to stand by while the monster at the top of the food chain comes begging for redemption. He’d thought himself burnt out past rage, but the world is full of surprises.

Caring for the angel has become a routine. Dean spends the days on the porch, or roaming the field out back, never too far in case one of the owners takes it into their head to go knocking on the door. Michael likely wouldn’t answer, but he might, and that’s what worries Dean. The archangel won’t do anything to harm the elderly pair, of that he’s certain, but the sight of him, wounded and beautiful and strange, will bring questions.

This careful routine is taking it out of him. Dean’s days consist of checking on the archangel. Once in the morning, listening from the tiny passage or pressing the bedroom door open when it’s too quiet to check he’s still there, or perhaps still alive. Most likely at midday too because it’s not in him to leave a threat of any kind sitting where he can’t see it. And then in the evening to offer food, not that the angel ever accepts. It’s an unwelcome chore and it means he can’t drink as much because of it. He has to be up and aware to deal with the elderly couple, avert their suspicions, and keep an eye out for any more of Michael’s unfriendly family.

To top it off, he feels fucking terrible.

Dean’s been doing this long enough to know that when the drink makes the tiny shake in his hands go away, it’s time to put the bottle away for good. He’s not so far gone that he doesn’t recognise the warning signs and hate them. Hate himself too, but that’s nothing new. He grimaces down into the whiskey glass, his first of the day, a good day, a good thing that, and thinks maybe he’s ended up more like his father than he’d thought.

“Dean.”

The archangel is standing in the doorway behind him, propping himself up against the frame. The first thing Dean thinks is  _ how the hell did I not hear you _ ? but the first thing he notices is how bad the angel looks. “Are you all right?” he asks, and can’t even dislike himself for asking. The angel very genuinely looks like shit.

“I need a favour,” Michael says, and the words sound wrong in his mouth. He blinks slowly as he speaks them, as though they’re the strangest thing he’s ever said, and gives Dean such a look of confusion and discomfort that Dean is taken aback by the honesty of it.

“What?”

“A favour. I need-...I need to go to a church, Dean. I need a church. Can you take me to one?”

For a second Dean doesn’t react. He squints up at the archangel, at the sweat on his pale skin and the fever in his gaze. His pupils are blown, and his focus is hazy, and Dean sees the whiteness around his knuckles where he grips the doorframe like a lifeline. It crosses his mind to ask what the hell is going on, and then the angel sways, rights himself and squints blearily at him.

“Fuck,” Dean says.

“Dean-”

“Just-, just shut up. I’ll bring the car round. Don’t drop dead, there’s no room in the trunk to fit your body.”

He pushes himself to his feet, sets down his whiskey glass, and as he’s dusting off his jeans thinks to himself that it’s a damned good job he hasn’t had more than that to drink today.

 

\--

 

They drive for three hours before they find a church that suits Michael’s needs. Even then, Dean’s not sure if they stop because it meets the archangel’s criteria or if he’s simply too desperate to last any longer. He can’t tell what it is Michael’s looking for, and the archangel doesn’t elaborate beyond the terse shake of his head that tells Dean he needs to keep driving. Out of curiosity, and a strange sense of fascination, he doesn’t push him for details.

When Michael finally points out a place that satisfies him, Dean is unimpressed. The church is tiny but picturesque, and hidden down a side-road, its white wooden walls and grey slate roof peeking out from behind a stand of trees. Dean pulls the Impala around the front into the small circular parking area, hearing the crunch of gravel loud beneath the car’s tyres. Every light inside is off, and he can see from here that the door is securely padlocked. The board outside announces the service times with push-pin letters clean enough to indicate their regular upkeep. He kills the engine and leans forward over the steering wheel, looking up at the pale building. The late-August evening is fading fast now, and here in the shelter of the copse of trees the shadows have begun to deepen.

“You sure?”

Michael doesn’t reply. The archangel is already labouring his way out of the car, pushing himself upright with a pained grunt. Dean curses softly, and gets out to help him.

There’s still a warmth to the late evening air that lifts the scent of the pines and fills the small parking lot. It’s pleasant, and it offsets the scent of fresh pain sweat that darkens the angel’s shirt. Dean puts a hand under his arm and steadies him as they make their slow way up the short flight of steps. He glances around the deserted clearing, his gaze sweeping the road for signs of headlights. There’s nothing but the far-off glow of houses and the quiet hum of evening insects.

The doors to the church are padlocked closed, and Dean is already reaching for his lockpicks with a frown. Michael gets there first. He places a palm on the lock and the mechanism clicks open beneath his touch. Pulling the curve of metal free he pockets it, and then pushes the door open. Before Dean can move to follow him inside, Michael pauses in the doorway, one arm pressed against the door to keep him back.

“I will do this alone.”

Dean pulls up in surprise, fighting to keep his expression neutral. A flare of anger lights in his breast but he pushes it down, unwilling to give the archangel the satisfaction of seeing him rankled by a command.

“Try not to die in there,” he says tersely, and turns away.

He catches only the briefest flash of blue as Michael meets his gaze, and then his back is to him. He takes a slow seat on the top step of the flight of stairs, settling himself to keep an eye out on the road. The warmth is fading faster now and he shrugs his jacket further up around his neck to keep out the coming chill, stuffing his hands deep into his pockets. He can feel the weight of Michael’s regard on the back of his shoulders, then footsteps and the slow swing and clunk of the church door closing.

Dean sits on the top step of the stairs and his fingers itch for the flask he left sitting on the porch of the barn.

 

\--

 

When Michael stumbles out again two hours later, he's not looking happy or healed. His face is pale and composed, but there’s something empty in his eyes that looks a little like shock, and a lot like fear. He doesn’t reply when Dean rises to his feet and greets him, simply makes his way back down the stairs and towards the Impala.

For all the prayer that must have gone on in that time, for all that he took himself into his Father’s house to do it, the archangel is pale and frustrated, and Dean thinks he got no answers.

With a sigh and a frown of disgust back over his shoulder, Dean follows him back to the car.

 

\--

 

“Why aren’t you healing?”

Michael is stretched out on the bed, one arm thrown over his face. Dean can see the shallow rise and fall of his chest, too fast to be normal, and can smell the blood and sweat stink of him. It’s midmorning and the scent of fresh bread wafts through from the kitchenette, such a homely, normal thing. It doesn’t suit dying archangels, doesn’t make sense within the context of the creature lying on the bed panting its pained way through the days.

“Why - aren’t - you -  _ healing _ ?” Dean enunciates each word slowly, his hands gripping the frame of the bedroom door. He glares at the archangel, willing him to co-operate, just this once, and wonders again why he doesn’t just leave the bastard here. If ever there had been a better time to make a break for it then he hasn’t seen it. With Michael so weak Dean realises that it would be the work of moments to just pack his things and get the hell out of Dodge. Except- the thought hasn’t even crossed his mind. He considers that with some surprise, turning the realisation over in his head and carefully testing the strength of his reasoning. He can’t leave him now, half-dead and barely capable of dragging himself off the bed. It wouldn’t be-... _ right _ .

“My power is bound to you.”

The angel’s voice is a dry rasp, so harsh that it takes Dean a moment to process and pick out the words. A moment longer to work through them.  _ Bound _ . It’s a word the angel has used before.

“What do you mean, bound?” Dean asks shortly.

Michael breathes out, the sound of it hitched with poorly managed pain. “My influence, my power, I am beholden to you.”

Dean blinks, shakes his head, feeling the effect of too little sleep, and less alcohol than he’d prefer. “Speak English,” he snaps.

“My power has been tied to you, Dean Winchester, like a rope, like a  _ chain _ , so that I might not be permitted to run  _ away _ .”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. There’s a dark bitterness in the archangel’s voice, lying just below his words like a shadowed, depthless pool, and it raises the hairs on the back of Dean’s neck. “So daddy didn’t trust you to do what he said?”

He thinks that if Michael were not wounded, bound or not, the archangel would have struck him then. For a moment the angel forgets to breathe, and his fingers tighten into a fist. He presses the back of his forearm hard across his eyes, and his lips twitch in something that’s halfway between a sneer and a smile. It’s ugly, and Dean straightens warily.

“It would not be without precedent,” Michael rasps.

_ Gabriel. Lucifer _ . Dean thinks. He shakes his head, lets out a deep breath. “So really, you’re here because you have to be, not because you want it, am I right?”

“I am my Father’s son, I do as He wills.”

“When it suits you.”

Michael’s body tenses, his forearms shaking with a suppressed anger, and Dean thinks again that it’s only his wound that’s keeping him in check. There’s silence, broken only by the rasp of the angel’s breath. His suit is askew, the shirt crumpled across his vessel’s broad chest where his pained contortions have twisted creases into the fabric. He’s still, somehow, beautiful.

“No,” the angel replies softly. “No, that’s not the case. It was never meant to be the way of it. It’s not-,” he pauses, trails off into silence, and Dean feels his lips curling with derision.

“Well that’s the road to hell, isn’t it?” he growls.

“Yes,” Michael breathes. “Yes it is.”

There’s no blood any more. The angel’s shirt is clean, but Dean knows that the bandages below still darken to black when left too long. It’s not blood, he doesn’t know what it is, and Michael won’t talk. It makes Dean think of poison and the colour of demons’ eyes.

In the long, slow drag of his life, through the years on the road, the tortuous eternity of hell, the return, the fight, the end, Dean has come to know pain. He’s seen suffering, experienced it, and inflicted it too. He understands the bite of it, the dragging at the soul and the very essence of what makes the sufferer a person. He knows what pain does to someone, how it eats away slowly at their sense of self, until the world becomes nothing more than the crawling it takes to stay alive. Dean’s been there, he’s done that, he finds, to his faint surprise, that he doesn’t wish it upon anyone.

“So how do I heal you?” he asks.

Perhaps Michael doesn’t hear him the first time, or maybe he doesn’t understand the question. When Dean speaks his name in warning and frustration, the archangel lifts his forearm from across his eyes to peer at him. His gaze is glassy and dark, and Dean frowns.

“Give me some of my power back,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

Michael swallows, shifting on the bed to push himself upright. Dean straightens, hands slipping down the door frame, fighting the urge to step away.

“Allow me a portion of my power and I will heal myself,” the archangel rasps.

“I don’t have your power,” Dean replies warily.

“You do, my Father has bound me to you. At your word I can take it back and heal myself.”

Dean feels a thrill of alarm tighten the muscles in his shoulders. The angel’s tone is meant to be soothing, reasonable, but all Dean hears is a creature trapped. He thinks again of demons.  

“I don’t-”  _ feel any different _ , he wants to say, but draws up short. This is a trap of some kind, it has to be. God wouldn’t do something like- he pauses his train of thought again. Who’s to say what God will do anymore? Look at all the things he’s already done. “ _ Why _ ?”

Michael smiles, and his eyes drift shut. He seems to be working through his pain and the frustration of dealing with a mortal so slow to comprehend. “Are you not the Righteous Man?”

“That was my father and you fucking know it,” Dean rasps.

The archangel breathes out soft laughter and shakes his head. His eyes slide open and he looks up. “Your father was a Righteous Man, as are you. It did not end in Hell, Dean-”

“No, you bastard. It never ends,” Dean snarls.

Michael regards him carefully, head tilted to one side. Dean can feel him trying to work out how to tackle him next, how to bring him round to his way of thinking, to get inside his head and make everything seem as damned and inevitable as he always used to.

“You want healing?” Dean asks. “You go ahead and heal yourself, buddy. You’re the archangel, you got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out again.”

“Dean-”

He hears the archangel call his name, recognises the catch of breath as him moving too fast for the state of his vessel’s body, and doesn’t pause to help. Dean lets the bedroom door swing closed behind him, picks his keys and the bottle of whisky off the counter, and goes out into the night.

 

\--

 

The dawn chorus is in full swing when Dean pushes the front door open, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes. Fatigue pulls at his body, making his muscles ache and his limbs drag with heaviness. His head is fuzzy and unstable, aching with the bottle and uncertain in its perceptions. Beneath his feet the ground feels treacherous, as though certainty of footing is a passing fancy.

Dean pauses and stares for a too-long moment at the archangel stretched out on the kitchen floor, his arms fallen wide, head tilted back and slightly to the side. He can see the subtle rise and fall of Michael’s chest, irregular and shallow. In the weak, early morning sunlight, his skin is pale enough to be ghastly.

He isn’t dead, but he looks like he’s not far off.

When Dean touches his skin, Michael is clammy. A dark bloom of poisoned blood stains the fabric of his shirt where the angel’s blade cut him, and against the remnant scent of yesterday’s fresh bread, it smells of rot.

Dean sits back on his heels, wipes his palm down his face, and then, with a curse, pulls out his phone and dials.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	4. IV.

**IV.**

 

It takes two days of straight driving to get to Bobby’s. The old hunter meets him on the doorstep with a grim frown and an accusing look, and Dean’s heart clenches in his chest.  _ I’m sorry _ , he thinks,  _ I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do. _ “Help me with him,” he says instead.

Between them they manhandle the unconscious archangel down into the basement, and from there into the panic room. They lie him on the cot that has seen so much use over the last few years, and Dean tries not to let the memories steal the last of the strength from his body.

“Do we tie him?” Bobby asks.

Dean shakes his head in negation. “He ain’t going anywhere once we close this door.”

“You sure about that, boy?”

“Trust me on this, Bobby,” Dean mutters. “He’s out for the count, and he won’t leave anyway.”

Bobby’s grim expression speaks volumes on his opinion, but Dean ignores it. He casts an eye over the warding sigils the old hunter has sprayed across the walls of the room, to keep angels both out and in, and nods once. He’s done his work well, as always.

“All right,” he says finally. “All right, I need a beer.”

The clang of the panic room’s door slamming shut is loud in the enclosed space. Dean peers in one last time through the viewing slit once he’s slid the bolts home. The archangel doesn’t stir from his place on the cot, and with a grimace Dean slides the cover closed and walks away.

 

\--

 

It’s a quarter to four in the afternoon, and the clock in Bobby’s kitchen keeps a stately time. The old hunter is sat at his kitchen table, across from the boy who’s once more brought trouble back into his house. Except Dean’s not a boy any more, hasn’t been young since he was ten years old. He’s a man now, bringing the same old trouble time and again back to his pseudo-father’s door. Man enough now to know the older hunter sitting across from him for what he is.

“Bobby,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”

It had been eleven in the morning with the sunlight making the rows of dusty cars gleam when Dean had pulled the Impala into Singer Salvage Yard. Time to haul the deadweight archangel down into the basement, a pause for an early lunch of beer and sandwiches, and then the rest of it had been talking. It’s a long time for a man like Dean who’s spent the last three months breaking the silence only when paying a motel clerk or the cashier in the 7-11. And when talking to the archangel that’s followed him from one side of the country to another.

Bobby shifts and his chair creaks, loud in the quiet. He sets his empty beer down on the table and folds his arms. The rise and fall of his chest is long and slow with the depth of his sigh. Dean looks up into his eyes and knows from the dip of the older man’s chin that he’s not going to like his reply.

“Give it to him,” Bobby says.

For a second Dean can’t reply. Then, “Bobby?”

The old hunter narrows his eyes and shakes his head minutely. “We do what we have to, boy. Even when it’s the hard choice. We make it, because there’s no other way.”

“Bobby, this isn’t some low level demon, or some cherub we’re talking about here. This is a goddamned archangel! This is  _ Michael _ . This is the guy that wanted to destroy Earth and have a pool party in the rubble!”

Bobby nods once, then draws his chin in, gaze steady. “Don’t be a fool, Dean. You’re damned right this is Michael - biggest, baddest archangel to ever walk Creation. And now he’s here, locked up in my basement bleeding out because you won’t pull your fingers out of your ears and give him what he needs.”

Dean leans back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “What the hell’s gotten into you, Bobby?” he asks in confusion. “You know what those bastards did, what they did to you. This guy deserves every damned thing that happens to him.”

Bobby regards him in silence, and Dean can feel that he’s missing something important. The old hunter knows something, has seen something that he hasn’t. Dean can feel the floor going out from beneath him, feels it fall away and is glad that he’s sat down. This is what it feels like to despair, to chase your own tail until you’re dizzy with it, and all the while everyone else already knows the answer. Over and over, he never sees it fast enough.

“Who’s this gonna help, boy?”

Dean laughs, low and frustrated. “Oh, you think I haven’t thought about that, Bobby? Doesn’t work like that. What, you think he’ll flap around doing my bidding now? You think I can run him around like some celestial errand boy? He’s the most dangerous monster left in all Creation, the first thing I should have done when he showed up was kill him. It’s what I should be doing right now. Finishing him off.”

“Don’t be a goddamned fool.”

Dean slams his fist into the table and presses it there, making the crockery rattle. He grits his teeth and shakes the anger out of his mouth. “If I help him, he’s won.”

“So it’s pride then?” Bobby asks, eyebrows raised.

“That bastard destroyed my family!” Dean shouts, and then snarls at the sympathy he sees in the old hunter’s eyes. Pity, sympathy, understanding - he doesn’t need that crap. He just needs someone to understand the anger, to feel it the same way he does. The all-consuming burn of it.

“What about Sam?” Bobby asks softly.

He keeps the twist of his lips from turning into a sneer only barely. “I told you, he can’t get Sam out. It was the first thing I asked.”  _ Almost _ . He’d tried to kill him first, and then throw him out when that didn’t work. Dean closes his eyes briefly against the guilt of that.

“For now.”

When Dean opens his eyes to look at him, Bobby shakes his head. “There’s always another way, boy. You just have to find it. Besides, he might be lying.”

“He’s not lying,” Dean replies immediately, and is only vaguely surprised to find that he believes it absolutely. No, Michael doesn’t lie.  _ He doesn’t always speak the truth though, does he _ ? some small part of him comments, and Dean blinks the thought away.

The table creaks as Bobby pushes himself to his feet. Dean watches him rise, waiting for the come-back, but the old hunter just shakes his head and takes the dishes to the sink. He stacks them carefully, ready for washing after the evening meal, and then wipes his hands on his faded old jeans. He glances out of the window then reaches for his work jacket and the keys to one of the cars he’s been working on.

“Think of Sam, if nothing else,” he says.

Dean doesn’t reply, and Bobby leaves him alone with his thoughts.

 

\--

 

Michael catches him by the wrist when Dean passes his cot. His fingers are cold and no matter how gently he means it, his grip is like a steel vice. Dean draws up short, a startled sound choked off in the back of his throat, his palms still wet from the condensation on the glass of ice water he’d set down next to the archangel’s cot.

“Thought you were asleep,” he manages.

Michael grunts a negative and Dean can see the light from the vent overhead reflected in his eyes, glassy and strange. “He is marked,” the angel whispers. “Unjustly. Bring him, I will fix it.”

Dean moves to pull away, but the angel’s grip is relentless. “What are you talking about?”

Michael wets his lips, breathing through his mouth, and blinks. “Your friend is marked by a demon. As one who was present at the end, a Witness, it is not to be tolerated.”

“Bobby? You can see that?”

The angel nods.

Dean’s mind races with the possibilities, with the consequences. Bobby’s deal had given them access to Death, and a way to open the Cage, but it had given Crowley the old man’s soul in return. A soul the canny demon has yet to return. “What is this,” he asks warily. “A  bribe? No, no you stay away from him.”

“No, Dean. No bribe. It’s not right, it’s-... _ wrong _ . It’s all wrong. He should not be marked. Bring him to me. I can purify him.”

“Let me go.” Dean says it coldly, deliberately, and after a moment, Michael’s grip falters, then falls away. He lies back on the bed, and Dean scowls at him. His mind is whirling with the possibility of it, and the fear of being deceived. He’s never heard of an angel interceding in a crossroads deal before. The Heavenly Host are far too interested in everyone getting their just desserts for that. But then, if Michael  _ could _ do it...and if anyone could be capable of something like that then surely the prince of all angels would be the one.

He’s still staring when Bobby steps inside the panic room, a bowl of soup in one cloth-wrapped hand. “Here,” he says. “You’ll do no good starving that vessel of yours.”

Dean watches him cross the room, unsure what to say, or how to even broach the subject. He’s thinking of taking him outside, or back up to the kitchen and going over what they could get out of this, if it would work and what exactly the catch would be, when Michael reaches out a hand and places it on Bobby’s shoulder.

There’s a sound like the crackle and rush of a burning campfire, as though something, somewhere has ignited and burnt away, and both Dean and Bobby flinch sharply. The noise comes out of nowhere and is gone as suddenly as it came, and then Michael’s hand falls away and Bobby is staring down at him in mingled horror and shock.

“What the hell was that?” Bobby demands, around the same time Dean steps forward with an inarticulate cry of something - warning, or fear perhaps.

“Fire purifies,” Michael whispers. “You are set free.”

The angel is staring at Bobby with something strange and a little unbalanced in his eyes, and Dean growls, closing the distance between himself and the old hunter with one hurried stride. He pulls Bobby away, putting him out of reach behind him and snaps, “So you have enough power to do that, but not to heal yourself?”

A small, satisfied smile lifts the corners of Michael’s mouth and he lets his eyes slip closed. “Hush,” he soothes them.

“The hell did he just do-?” Bobby demands, and Dean grabs him by the shoulder, herding him towards the door and out of the panic room.

He manages to get him back up to the kitchen before Bobby overcomes his shock and pushes Dean’s hands away. “What was that?” he demands. “What did he do?”

Dean takes a step away, hands up, palms raised as though to plead for calm. “Bobby, listen,” he tries, but the old hunter’s impatience is too much, and Dean is forced to speak over him. “ _ Listen _ to me. Just- he, look. He broke the contract you made with Crowley.”

The words silence the other man as surely as a slap to the face, and he gapes at him. Dean reads the tumble of emotion in the old man’s eyes, seeing surprise turn to relief and then, sure as the sunrise, to fear. 

“He did what?” Bobby whispers. “Can he? Is that even… _ allowed _ ?”

Dean stares at him helplessly, and has no answer. All he knows are the rules as they’ve been told him, as he and his family have suffered under for so long. One soul, one boon for ten years. He has no idea what happens when you add the will of an archangel to the mix. 

“He did it,” Dean says. “I didn’t ask him to. He just did it.”

Bobby puts one hand to the kitchen table and leans on it, snatching his cap from his head with the other to scrub at his eyes. Dean watches him, riding the rising warmth of hope and relief and hating himself for it. One problem solved - so quickly, with such ease. As Bobby straightens and turns away to compose himself, Dean wonders what the consequences of this are going to be. He didn’t ask Michael to do this, in fact he’d explicitly told him not to. So then how are they to think of this, as a bribe or a blessing? 

Dean hopes to whatever God is left out there that it’s nothing worse.

 

\--

 

He’s still thinking about that half an hour later when Bobby’s serving up the rest of the soup in the kitchen.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the grizzled old hunter says. “I’m not complaining about what he did, but I think that archangel’s going mad.”

Dean pauses, spoon halfway to his mouth, but doesn’t need to ask for clarification. He can still picture the strange, fey look in the archangel’s eyes when he’d looked at Bobby afterwards, like a kid looking to prove its worth, or an old soldier desperate to show he’s still got something worth giving in life. That, more than anything, had made his flesh crawl. No-one should have to look like that.

He shakes his head and doesn’t answer.

 

\--

 

The house is still and quiet, and the creak of floorboards from overhead stopped around half an hour ago. He thinks Bobby must be asleep by now, or at the very least, not coming down again. Dean looks at the bottle of Jack sitting untouched on the floor by his foot, and wipes at his mouth with his fingers. It would be very easy to sit here in Bobby’s living room and drink himself into a semblance of peace. Instead he finds himself thinking of the angel.

There’s a debt to be paid here, and Dean doesn’t like being beholden to anyone. What Michael did for Bobby had been so simple, so effortless for a creature like him. It had cost him nothing, at least, nothing to which he is willing to admit. Dean doesn’t even know any more what the archangel is capable of, what he can do and what he’s hiding beneath the cover of his wounds. Behind the decree of his Father. Dean still wonders about that, about what it must be like to be in a position to receive instruction directly from God Himself, to be qualified by blood or grace or whatever it is that ties heavenly beings together by family, to speak to the one that began it all. Even after all he’s seen it still makes his head spin to think of it.

And here he is: Dean Winchester - human, not divine. Son of man, no special powers. Just a will that broke too soon, and a brother who meant everything that he never managed to save. Still means everything, he corrects himself. Except he doesn’t know any more. If there’s any hope, that is. If Michael is telling the truth then there’s no way out, is there? There’s nothing Dean can do. But then, he’s heard that one before.

The bottle of Jack calls to him, he can feel the need for it as a physical pull on his body. He doesn’t need it, but of course he does. And his will is so weak, isn’t it? He’s shown that, over and over again. He was the Righteous Man, just like his father, except John Winchester was the Righteous Man that never broke. The real deal. The thing that Dean can never be.

He goes down into the basement some time just before midnight.

Michael stirs at the sound of the iron door creaking open, and in the gloom his eyes are blue-bright with fever. Dean crosses the room to stand next to his cot, the tips of his fingers brushing the cool cotton of the bedsheet. It occurs to him that Michael really cannot help himself, would never willingly put himself through this humiliation. Except by his Father’s decree. But other people? He can help them apparently. Or maybe he can help those that are important to Dean because he’s been sent here to accept whatever punishment Dean lays upon him. Maybe that control extends to other aspects of Dean’s power over him. It occurs to Dean that he hasn’t been thinking very clearly these last few months.

“Show me what to do,” he says.

Michael breathes out a startled breath, as though he’d given up on hope and embraced resignation instead. It takes him a moment before he shifts on the cot, lifting a hand towards Dean. He doesn’t touch, his fingers pausing several inches from Dean’s chest, and the hunter’s eyes move from his hand back to the angel’s face.

“Place your hands upon me,” Michael whispers.

Dean draws in a deep, uncomfortable breath, but doesn’t argue. He can see the blossom of black blood on the angel’s bandages, and smell it over the iron and incense scent of the panic room. Slowly, he reaches out and places his palms flat on the angel’s chest, just below his shoulders. Michael lets his hand come to rest on Dean’s outstretched arm, between his elbow and the swell of his bicep.

“I will need to draw upon my power through you,” the angel says. “That is allowed, but only if you permit it.”

Dean blinks, and then understands. “You need my permission,” he says flatly.

Michael nods. “I need your  _ explicit _ permission,” he replies. “And there is none more so than this.”

“Is this going to-”  _ hurt _ ? Dean starts, the thought of ashes and burnt-out eyes in his head. “Is this going to break me?”

“No, never,” Michael’s response is immediate. “You are my true vessel Dean Winchester. You can most certainly contain my power.”

“This isn’t an invite, pal,” Dean warns him.

“And nor was I asking for that. We are a very long way past those days now, Dean.”

And Dean believes him. So help him god, but he believes him. He takes a moment to square his shoulders, settling and then resettling his fingers across the angel’s chest, wondering if this is going to hurt, and if there’s still time to somehow ask that question. Like he hasn’t had pain pushed on him before, like he can’t take it on the chin like he always does. Well, maybe it feels like he can’t any more. He desperately doesn’t want this to hurt, isn’t sure he has anything left in him to resist if it does.

“Go on then,” he nods.

Michael sighs out a long breath that has something of anticipation in it, and everything of relief. The fingers of his right hand tighten around Dean’s arm, and his eyes slip closed. At first, Dean feels nothing, just the pressure of the angel’s grip and the coolness of the air down here. He wonders when the pain is going to hit, and doesn’t realise how hard he’s clenching his teeth in anticipation of it. So when it does happen, it’s nothing as he expected.

He notices the light first. It creeps out from somewhere beneath them, or perhaps above, a diffuse glow that has Dean looking around for its source. Seeing nothing but the slow curl of soft light and the drift of dust motes, he frowns. “Michael…?”

In response, the archangel lifts his other hand and places his palm against Dean’s cheek. Dean pulls back slightly, then stops himself with some effort. It’s too late to back out now.  _ Should have read the instruction manual _ , he thinks wildly.

When the archangel asks for his permission, Dean feels it in every particle of his body. It's as though his perceptions shift, and, like one of those magic eye puzzles, meaningless static suddenly resolves itself to significance. Even then it’s strange, an echo of thought that comes more from within than it does without. Like a pulse of query that comes from somewhere inside his head that somehow, even without words, makes absolute sense to him. He knows the question, and he knows the explicit limitations of it.

Dean pauses only a moment before he replies. “All right,” he says. “All right, yes. You can.”

For the rest of his life, Dean Winchester will never be quite able to articulate what he sees in those long, strange moments of altered perception there in the basement of Bobby’s old house. When he opens his eyes, when he even realises that he’s closed them, he sees Michael, irises so deep and blue they can be nothing natural. Dean has the sense of suddenly being able to see further inside reality than he's ever been able to before, and it's not as though reality folds, or distorts itself to fit the archangel, more that suddenly there's simply so much  _ more _ to space, so much more depth than Dean has ever truly understood. Now he sees the archangel as light and fire, as a cosmic engine of enormous power, poorly contained within a shadowy shell of bone and muscle. It is both astounding and deeply unnerving.

When Michael calls upon his power, Dean feels the universe surge obediently in response. He feels its answer as a complex swell of light that sweeps upwards and through him, a magnetic pull that threatens to burn him away on the surge of its magnitude. He is so startled that he cries out, shocked at the raw power the archangel intends to draw through him.

Distantly, and yet so close, he feels Michael’s hand tighten on his arm, feels the angel’s fingers curl gently around his cheek and finds an unexpected comfort in that. Were this any other situation he would have been ashamed of it. But then, Dean has never experienced anything like this. It is raw power, righteous and elated, ordered and ancient and reborn anew. Like absolute understanding, and completion in its totality. Like nothing short of what God Himself must be. And amidst it all, Dean sees the archangel for what he truly is. 

Afterwards, he will never be able to find the right words to describe what he saw. For a long time he will see it again only in dreams, and then only as fragments. In the waking world the images slip away, defying the limitations of his mortal flesh and sending him tumbling into strange moods from which it takes him far too long to find his way back. Much later he will think of a figure made of light, a sword that burns with the distilled gleam of dawn slung over one shoulder. He will remember wings of light and fire, a hundred eyes and the wrong number of limbs, and two great hands that reach for him, slender but unbreakable in their strength.  

He will remember that he thought of sewing, and that even in the midst of it all, he didn't understand the reference. It will be only much later that he will realise that it was the way his brain interpreted the action of the archangel healing himself.

When Dean Winchester comes back to himself, the panic room is dark, and he’s slumped against Michael’s chest. The archangel has sat up, has pulled him onto the cot and across his lap. He has one arm around Dean’s shoulders and one hand resting lightly at the base of Dean’s jaw. He can feel the archangel’s fingers on the back of his neck, the pad of the angel’s thumb lightly tracing back and forth across the edge of his jawbone.

He wants to pull away, because he should. Because it’s not in him to be coddled by another man, or to let a creature like the archangel so near to him when he’s vulnerable. Instead he says, “You’re made of fire.”

And Michael laughs, soft and amused and whole once more.

 


	5. V.

**V.**

 

It’s late afternoon when Dean wakes up. The soft, diffuse glow of sunlight spills through the parted bedroom curtains and fills the room with warmth and gold. He blinks against the slow dance of dust particles, caught and illuminated in the slant of light falling in the window, and wipes the back of his hand across his eyes. It’s warm in the guest room, and he can feel himself sweating beneath the covers. With one hand he throws them aside, then lies back, staring up at the ceiling.

He hadn’t thought he would sleep. After what happened in the panic room he’d felt alive in a way he hadn’t for a very long time, his body filled with a thrum of energy, his limbs ready to stretch and run and carry him as far as he’d ever been able to run. He’d felt good. Michael had looked at him and smiled, just slightly, and told him that he should rest for the day.

Michael. The archangel is somewhere around the place, or out in the sunlight. Whole and well, just as he had been the first day he turned up again after the Apocalypse.

For a moment Dean lies there and thinks about that. About the end of the world, and the fight at Stull, and how Sam is still burning in Hell. About how it’s been a long time since those haven’t been the very first thoughts in his head the moment he opened his eyes from sleep.

He gets up and goes downstairs.

Bobby is in the kitchen washing dishes. He doesn’t turn around when Dean walks in, doesn’t even glance back over his shoulder, just says, “He went out. Few hours ago. Said he’d be back later.”

Dean pulls up short, realising that between coming round in the archangel’s arms and stumbling his way up to bed he hadn’t even thought to tell Bobby what he’d done. “I, uh-”

“Sit down. There’s food left in the pot.”

He doesn’t argue, just obeys. Halfway through his second bowl of food, Bobby sits down opposite him and just watches him eat. Dean lets him, figuring that turning up on a guy’s doorstep with one of the biggest bads of the last few years in tow has to at least earn him that much. He thinks about it though, about how Bobby had already made up his mind long before Dean figured out what he was supposed to do. It calms him, humbles him, how that’s always somehow been the way of it.

Dean wipes the last of the gravy out of his bowl with a chunk of bread, finishes up and pushes the empty dish aside. He looks up at Bobby and goes to tell him that he gets it if he’s angry. He doesn’t know what’s going to come next, or even what he’ll do, but he’ll leave now and take it all with him. But Bobby meets his gaze, older, wiser, and says, “Don’t waste your opportunities, boy. Now you’ve got him where you want him, use that goddamned archangel for good.”

In the end Dean doesn’t say anything at all of what he intended. He just swallows, and dips his head, and pushes past the gravel in his voice that closes up his throat.

“Thanks, Bobby.”

 

\--

 

He’s on the roof again, Dean can feel it.

He stands in the yard, the porch at his back, and looks up at the evening sky. The light is almost gone, and the first stars have started to speckle the heavens. There’s a beauty to the depthless blue fading its way towards night, and Dean takes a moment, deliberately, to appreciate it. So much of his life has been spent on the road, sleeping under these stars, that he’s been made blind to it through familiarity.

Somewhere up and to the rear of Bobby’s house he can feel the buzz of someone else’s presence. It’s a point of weight on the air that drags at him, like a steel ball tossed onto a taut sheet to prove the miracle of gravity. It’s a distant hiss too, like a radio left untuned, just off to one side and so quiet it’s almost imperceptible.

Dean fetches a ladder, sets it against the wall of the house where he knows the easiest footing will be, and begins to climb.

He finds the archangel at the rear of the property, sitting on one ridge of the roof, fingers clasped loosely together, elbows resting on his knees. Dean is unnerved to find that he can pick out the flicker and shift of Michael’s many wings trailing fire across the slates, there and then gone when he squints. If he looks directly at them he sees nothing at all. He’s not sure what he feels about this, or about what this means.

"What is it with you and heights?"

Michael laughs softly and turns to look over his shoulder. Dean meets his gaze squarely, ignoring the flicker of angel wings, and gradually the impression of them fades away. “Good evening, Dean,” the archangel replies.

With a huffed sigh, Dean makes his way carefully along the slope of the roof, one hand to the tiles, until he can sit down next to the archangel. He doesn’t ask permission, and Michael watches him approach with something of amusement in his expression. There’s a soft breeze up here, and it carries with it the scent of motor oil and trees, baked earth and someone’s barbeque. Michael smells of incense and fresh air, like churches and mountaintops.

“How are you feeling?” Dean asks.

The archangel nods, his perfect blue eyes turning away and back out across the salvage yard towards the road. “Better,” he replies. “Thank you.”

Dean grunts an acknowledgement, wanting not to feel the satisfaction the angel’s words raise in him. He shouldn’t be pleased by the answer, he should be wary. And yet he finds a certain relief in the absence of suffering in the archangel, and wonders at how much it had been eating at him to see such a creature brought low. Surely, surely there should have been some satisfaction, some vindication in the angel’s pain. He’s starting to wonder what it means that he doesn’t feel those things.

“You tuning in again?” he asks, glancing up at the sky.

Michael smiles, mirroring the direction of Dean’s gaze with his own. He flexes his fingers, intertwining them between his knees and rubbing the pad of his thumb around the edges of his palm. It’s a strangely human gesture that Dean’s only seen him do very occasionally.

"Would you like to hear as I do, Dean?" he asks suddenly.

Dean glances sideways at him in surprise. “Uh, I thought that wasn’t such a good idea for humans?”

Michael shakes his head slowly, that same small smile still on his lips. “I would shield you.”

“Why?” Dean asks warily.

It makes Michael turn to look at him, as though the idea of his refusal hadn’t ever really crossed the angel’s mind. “You asked what I’m doing. Don’t you want to know first hand?”

Dean looks sideways at him, rubbing dirt from the palms of his hands. The sun has baked dust into the roof tiles and his hands are dark with it from where he steadied himself to get out here. He wonders what Michael thinks he’s doing, offering this.

“Sure. Why not.”

He only catches Michael’s sigh of approval out of the corner of his eye - the lift and fall of the angel’s shoulders and the single nod of his head. When the angel reaches for him with just the fingertips of one hand, he manages not to flinch away.

“Listen,” Michael says quietly, and presses his fingers against Dean’s temple.

Even mortal as he is, the dissonance is clear. Dean has been to Heaven, has already felt in the bones of his soul the complex song of the Host. He knows what it should sound like, mighty and glorious and absolute. This whisper of sound that tumbles down from the Heavens is not that crystalline tapestry of music and meaning. This song, filtered through the physicality of Earth, is fractured and incomplete.

On reflection, Dean thinks he ought to feel more awe. More fear, more wonder, more-...something. But Dean Winchester has seen Heaven and Hell. He’s slain dukes of the Abyss and fist-fought in the dirt with archangels. There is little left in this world and the next that can surprise him. Instead he listens to the strangely cracked voice of Heaven floating down from some metaphysical sense of aboveness, and moves on past it. From all around and below he hears the buzz and cry of humanity, spread out across the globe, and then further down, far below even that, is the dark, slow swirl of hell, like the creep and menace of magma.

“Once, that song would have been pure, perfect. Now though,” Michael says, shaking his head. “Now there is discord. War again sets foot in Heaven.”

“They’re fighting each other? Over what?” Dean asks.

“What to do next,” Michael murmurs. “Over who should lead now that both I and Zachariah and several others are gone.”

Dean snorts softly, eyeing the sadness in the angel’s eyes with irritation. So Heaven’s got its panties in a twist, big deal. For all the hell they’ve caused down here it feels right that they too should suffer the consequences. “What about that other one, that brother of yours, Raphael?”

Michael’s expression doesn’t change, and Dean reads all he needs to in that alone.  _ Not qualified, huh _ ? he thinks.  _ Or maybe that’s just how you see it _ . Still though, if there’s to be war in Heaven then it follows that soon enough their conflict will spill out onto Earth, just as it did the first time round. The first time led to demons and the supposed fall of Man. He doesn’t want to think of what could happen this time.

“And what about them?” he asks, nodding his chin out across the yard towards the city. In the lowering evening the lights of the houses have just started to twinkle.

“Them?” The archangel’s eyes narrow in confusion, and he looks sideways at Dean, then back out across the yard where the trucks pile up in weary, haphazard stacks.

Although Michael’s fingertips no longer press against his temple, Dean can still hear the voices of humanity pressing in from all around. The whispered prayers of mothers, the angry cries of people all alone, the brutal rage of the righteous. He can see the blank lack of comprehension in the archangel’s eyes, and although he knows it stems from preoccupation with the tribulations of heaven, it makes a flat, powerful anger surge in his belly.

"I thought you were supposed to hear them,” he says.  _ To listen to them _ .

Michael stares at him, and Dean knows the angel caught the tail-end of his thought when he sees the understanding creep into his eyes. In all the books the role of archangel is guide, protector, intercessor between man and God. Even though the idea of a merciful, loving God died a long time ago for Dean, he still knows the legends, can’t help but know the saccharine stories that surround God’s angels. Perhaps a small unacknowledged part of him has always wanted to believe the dream. Hope, after all, is a powerful addiction.   

The archangel says nothing, and the anger swells, surges, then falls away into something tired and unsurprised.

"I thought so," says Dean.

After a moment, Michael looks away. Dean feels his lips twist as though to smile, but the tightness in his throat is too painful for amusement. The rush of light and power from the previous night has faded to something muted and distant. The rapture of perfect comprehension is gone, leaving him cold and empty and confused, disappointed to once again be filled with the doubts of mortality. He thinks about Michael, sat on high in heaven, surrounded by his sycophants and cut off from reality. Not doing the job his Father left for him, or at best doing only the job he thought he was there to do. There’s a sad, tired humour in an archangel that embodies filial loyalty being so blind to his true duty that he doesn’t see the world burning around him.

When the archangel speaks, his voice is low. Dean is almost startled by it.

“My father was gone, Dean. My brother dead to me. And I? Although I denied it, the idea was there written across Creation - in the faces of my sisters, the pulse of the stars. That I,  _ I _ had caused this. You don’t fully understand, Dean. For an archangel to know doubt is to allow the unravelling of Creation. I could not bear it, I turned away from the very thought of it, from the concept of my failure. And I withdrew - to plan I imagined. But in truth, I wanted nothing more than for Heaven to rule itself.”

Dean listens in silence, and when the archangel pauses, he lets the quiet stretch, listening to the far-off crying of a loon and smelling again the scent of someone’s barbeque carried up along the rise from the houses far, far down the road. It occurs to him that Michael has lost the colloquial ring to his speech that he’d used when they’d first met all those months ago in the nineteen seventies. All at once he wonders what’s brought that about, whether it’s an unconscious lapse back into formality or if he’s simply given up the pretence as unnecessary now. He’s an archangel, Dean supposes, he must be capable of that level of manipulation. Clearly his brothers are.

“I abided by the letter of my father's law,” Michael rasps, and Dean thinks:  _ As though that makes it any better _ . He feels the archangel stiffen beside him and knows that he’s skimming the thoughts from his mind again.

“Stop it,” Dean says, and when Michael looks sideways at him, he narrows his eyes. “You know what I’m talking about.”

If the archangel withdraws his mind, or whatever it is he’s using to read him, then Dean doesn’t feel it. There’s no lifting of pressure, no lightening of his soul. Just him and the archangel, sat there on the roof of Bobby’s home.

The twilight has faded to true evening, and the yard below is cut by the squares of illumination falling from the windows of the living room. Bobby has made a fresh pot of coffee and Dean can smell the fragrance of it leaking from the open kitchen window. Far above the stars are made dim by the clear light of a half moon, luminescent against the deep blue of the summer eve. Dean tilts his head back, feeling a breeze across his forehead, and thinks of the end of the world.

Somewhere up there, metaphysically, spiritually, whatever this new dimension of understanding is labelled, there’s a choir of broken angels still singing because they don’t know how to do anything else. Dean thinks about that, about people who do the same things, over and over, trying to achieve a different result. It’s supposed to be madness, that kind of thing. If so, it runs in the family then, in both of them - Winchester and archangel. He thinks of all the angels bowed under the weight of their slavery to a concept, never pausing to consider, or never daring to question. He thinks briefly of Castiel, and closes his eyes.

He sees Sam, down there in the fire and the dark, and remembers again how that was never meant to be, and how it happened anyway. Fate they may have broken, but life and its hardships remain relentless.

"You know," says Dean. "You always tried to make out like there was no choice. Free will is an illusion, you said.” He pauses, gathers his thoughts, chasing the trailing ends of his reasoning. The thread of an idea hovers at the edge of his mind, moving so quickly that he’s in danger of losing it. Beside him the archangel tilts his head to listen.

“I think you chose though,” he continues quietly. “You chose a long time ago what you wanted to be. And you dragged us all along for the ride. Well. We put a stop to that, my brother and I. It took everything we had," Dean pauses, clears his throat when his voice cracks. "But we did it. Together."

In the quiet of the evening the night insects are the only sound. Dean forces his teeth together to fight the tightness in his throat, feeling the ache in his head where his body wants something - alcohol, sleep, Sam. Sam, Sam, always Sam, locked away and alone except for the Devil, fighting his battles on his own where Dean can’t reach him, can’t help him, can’t do the thing he’s always been made to do. Can’t protect him. The unfairness of it all, the sheer, monumental failure of hope, is crippling.  

The stories are never what they say they are, he’s seen that of both Heaven and Hell, and they don’t end like they do in the movies either. Dean has always known that, but he’s never truly understood it as he does now.

On the roof next to him, the archangel shifts, and he hears him draw in a breath. He thinks, from the hesitation, that perhaps he won’t want to hear what he’s going to say.

“Dean,” Michael says. His voice is low, careful. The type of voice you might expect the prince of all archangels to have - slow and deep and considerate. It makes something tremble in the pit of Dean’s stomach. “My Father didn’t bring Sam back, not because your brother was tainted, or because he had abandoned him, but because Sam chose to make his sacrifice, and my Father respected that choice.”

“Some choice!” Dean grates out. His voice is raw, and he can hear his own pain in it. “Some respect! Some- fuck.”

_ It is, as you say, Free Will _ . The archangel doesn’t say it aloud, but Dean hears the words anyway, with a strange certainty. He can feel the trembling in the muscles of his arms, born from the strain of keeping under control the rush and fury of his grief. It’s too much, too much for one person alone.

“It’s not fair.” The words scrape out of him, twisted with the piteous tones of a little boy and Dean hates it, hates that tone, hates how it makes him sound.

“No,” Michael replies softly. “No, it is not.”

Scattered far above, the stars look down in silence, and up from the plains a soft, cool breeze lifts the leaves and sets the trees to whispering. Against the darkness of the evening sky the archangel’s wings are a flickered suggestion of fire, lifting up and around, the idea of flaming feathers breathed across the fabric of reality. Where they rise they form a shield against the night, and the archangel draws them up and over, cautiously extending the ghost of flaming pinions around the shoulders of the man sitting next to him. By their light the stars are made dim, and for just a little while, Dean lowers his head and lets the ghost fire of their touch keep the night at bay.

 

\--

 

In the end, Dean doesn't choose punishment for the archangel.

They spend two weeks more at Bobby’s, with Dean working on the Impala, all grease and oil and the familiar, soothing trance state of fixing a thing. The archangel wanders the yard, fingertips trailing over the rusting shapes of old cars, or goes out into the world without a word. Dean doesn’t ask him where he goes, and Michael rarely volunteers the information. When he comes back though he sometimes brings with him the scent of incense and the desert, or spices, and one time, freshly ground coffee.

During the day, Dean leans over the engine of the Impala, looking down into its inner workings, and sometimes when he looks he sees engine grease and dark metal, but other times he sees a complex machine kept running only by his careful ministrations. He could make a metaphor out of that, he thinks. But then his lips turn up in disgust and he wipes down his hands because a car is nothing like a planet, or a species, or one single human heart. Because at the end of the day a car is just a car and a human soul is so much more.

He thinks about it though, about free will and making the right choice and doing the impossible. And then he thinks again of Sam, and for a long few moments he has to just breathe through the grief of it. Because Sam would say “Carry on, Dean” like they’d agreed, except after hell and all its tortures Dean knows even Sam would say help me help me  _ helphelphelpme _ \- and, breathe. Just breathe.

He and the archangel don’t get along much better now. Sharing grace or touching souls or whatever the hell it was they did that allowed Michael to heal himself, didn’t magically heal the rift between them. Dean’s still wary and resentful and angry, but not all the time now, not every waking moment. Even so there’s a bad night when he opens up a bottle and by the time he’s halfway through it becomes a good idea to go ask the archangel why if he can break the claim on Bobby’s soul then why can’t he break Sam out of jail too? Why, Michael? Why not? If it’s about free will then Bobby made that choice as much as Sam did and what’s the fucking difference  _ answer me- _ !

He remembers Michael holding him by the shoulders, so strong that escape is an impossibility, so tight that even through the haze of alcohol he could feel the pain of that immovable grip. He remembers the archangel’s stillness, his calm, his silence - the way the carpet had felt through his jeans when his knees had hit the floor. How he’d leaned into the archangel’s grasp and just roared his fury and despair at the world. He remembers the whites of Bobby’s eyes as the old hunter watched warily from the doorway, the fear in him so strange and unaccustomed it was itself unnerving. He thinks Michael might have sent Bobby away, but he doesn’t fully remember.

In the days that follow Dean puts away the bottles and goes back to work on the Impala. He helps Bobby around the yard, and as he does so he turns over all the memories he has of his brother and what they both did to save the world. He remembers the blood, the pain, the love they’d had. He remembers Sammy’s smile, and what Bobby said to him back when he and the archangel had first turned up on his doorstep.  _ There’s always another way _ .

It all comes down to free will at the end of the day, to the choices a man makes. Dean and his brother learned that lesson, but maybe Michael needs to learn it as well. After all, it had been Michael who’d said God had ordered him to accept Dean’s punishment, that it’s Dean’s choice to punish him and how. Maybe Dean can make the punishment freedom, and that’s how he gets to thinking about it, about setting Michael free, and how he would even go about it. How he can even think it without burning up in rage and hate and vengeance.

Except he doesn’t, he can’t. All he sees is a little brother lost, and an older brother that failed him. Sometimes when he thinks about it he sees himself and Sam, and sometimes he sees Lucifer and Michael, and sometimes he wonders what the hell the difference is between them all any more.

 

\--

 

The sun has only just risen, turning the Impala’s chrome fittings to molten silver when the archangel finds him. Dean is stowing the last of his kit in the trunk of the car, pushing it down so it fits nicely when the archangel appears at his shoulder. He’s wearing a faded blue shirt over a white t-shirt, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets in a way Dean’s never seen before. He wonders where he picked that habit up.

“Have you decided yet?”

The trunk closes with a soft thud and Dean turns, squinting against the low angle of the rising sun. In this light the archangel’s eyes look pale and washed out, and somewhere in his features Dean thinks he can see the echo of his father. Or maybe of Sam, hidden in the slant of his cheeks and the generous width of his mouth.

“Decided what?”

“What penance you will assign.”

Dean sighs and shakes his head once, slowly. “I’m not punishing you.”

He sees the flare of irritation in the archangel’s eyes and feels the prickle of it like heat from a bonfire across his skin. Startled, but not cowed, he stands his ground. For a brief moment Dean thinks the archangel might argue with him, maybe give in to his frustration and demand to be set free then if Dean won’t play by the rules. He almost hopes so, because Dean has an answer for that demand.

“So what will you do then, Dean Winchester?” Michael asks softly. “Will you send me away?”

And Dean laughs at that, at the archangel’s poor attempt at subtlety. “Man, you never listened the first twenty times I told you, why the hell would you start now?”

“Then what is your will, Dean Winchester?” the archangel asks, and for just a moment, there in the early morning sunlight, Dean sees in his eyes the shadow of the ancient being that Michael truly is, and like the vertigo that comes with standing on a high ledge he can feel the staggering power, the unfathomable age of him. Then Michael raises his chin, and the petulance of the gesture makes him seem arrogant and foolish all over again, just another son left behind by a father that couldn’t live up to expectations.

“I guess we’re just going to have to see,” Dean replies softly. And when Michael cocks his head in query, he adds, “We both got a lot of fixing to do.”

Because if nothing else, Dean remembers what the archangel said to him up there on the roof, under the cold gaze of the summer stars. About choice and sacrifice, respect and free will, and he thinks he understands something that the archangel cannot. Something that maybe God has been telling them for a few thousand years now, since he left them all behind and went his own way. Because Dean suspects that humans aren’t the only ones to have free will these days, even if they don’t fully realise or understand it, and because Dean thinks that duty and free will don’t necessarily have to exclude one another.

So, in the end, Dean doesn't punish Michael, and he doesn’t set him free. Because it would be too easy, and because he simply can’t. That choice isn’t his to make. Instead he’ll wait until the day the archangel catches up of his own accord, until he listens to his own words and realises that when God left, he left them all behind. That angels and mortals may be more alike than either side cares to realise. That free will is a choice of its own. Because Dean thinks at that point maybe Michael will be the one to set himself free. The one to choose his own punishment, or, more likely, his own road to redemption.

Until then, Dean will do something close to what God commanded, for old times’ sake, in the spirit of the good son, and because, at the end of the day, it’s his duty. To carry on, to do the right thing. And because of that Dean will take the angel out, and show him the world all over again, until the angel remembers to listen not just for angels, but for humanity too, and he tells him that maybe, just maybe, there's hope for them both.

Because there has to be.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it. :)


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